


Division

by the_drift



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: A Desert of Love, Aftermath of Violence, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Divergence - Thor (2011), Childhood Memories, Contemporary War, First Kiss, First Time Together, Graphic Depictions of War Violence, Grieving, Gun Violence, King Loki, Loki is Still An Asshole But A Wiser One, Longing, M/M, Mutual Pining, Slow Build, Slow Burn, Smoking, Story Arc, Thor Is Hella Bitter About Earth, Thor as a Soldier, War, War violence, mentions of Odin's A+ parenting, so much love
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-16
Updated: 2021-03-18
Packaged: 2021-03-25 02:55:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 31,444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30082416
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_drift/pseuds/the_drift
Summary: (Fic has been re-edited and re-posted/ Fic will be updated every other day, as I edit and beta chapters)When Thor was banished from Asgard after creating trouble with the Jotun, he stayed on Earth.Loki on the other hand, took over Asgard in lieu of the Odinsleep, and, surprisingly, turned out to be a wise leader.Meanwhile, Thor, unable to figure out mortal life beyond fighting and conflict, becomes a mercenary, shipped over to the most dangerous conflict zones in the world.He thinks of Loki often and he thinks about the things he never told him, the words and touches that almost were.Canon divergence starting from the first Thor movie, when Agent Coulson asks Thor if he is military.
Relationships: Loki/Thor, Thor/Loki
Comments: 16
Kudos: 45





	1. Chapter 1

_“We have not touched the stars,_ _nor are we forgiven,_

 _which brings us back_ _to the hero’s shoulders and the gentleness that comes,_

_not from the absence of violence,_

_but despite_

_the abundance_

_of_ _it.”_

― Richard Siken, Crush

His ears were ringing.   
Deep breaths, _one-two_ , he only closed his eyes for a moment, _one-two_ , instinctively, to avoid the shrapnel and the dust. He breathed into his scarf, coughing for a moment or two, before he turned around and set his gun on the edge of the collapsed piece of wall he had been hiding behind. He waited until his eyes focused, as much as they could focus, irritated by dust and lack of sleep. He thought about the stupidest shit in that moment: the taste of cigarettes that morning and how they blended in nicely with the iced coffee Pavel had purchased from a shop in Kabul.  
He couldn’t hear shit except for the muffled sounds of weapons firing and, somewhere in between, a solitary scream.  
  
Someone tugged at his vest, pulling him by the collar, trying to drag him backwards and away from the line of fire, but he pushed them back and they stumbled down in the dust behind him and he refocused his eyes on the building ahead.  
He was here, this was his life now.  
His target was perched up on a balcony across the main street, and he could not see him, just the muzzle of his gun; and then swiftly, another movement behind the shooter – they were preparing the grenade launcher again. He shifted his aim towards a shoulder he could see moving - someone was helping another guy to load the grenade launcher. A hand, with a grenade between its fingers. He could see the fingers fiddling about through the gun's scope.  
  
 _One-two_ , he inhaled, then held his breath, his body steady as a rock. He could not be moved, he told himself. He was rock, he was mountain. He was not here. He was everywhere.  
He pressed the trigger, one single bullet flying out of the barrel, recoil pushing into his shoulder weakly. It was nothing compared to how Mjolnir felt as it returned to his hand. He thought of that in the fraction of a second it took for the bullet to travel to target. He thought about it hard, willing that bullet to have an aim as true as Mjolnir, and be just as unforgiving, before the balcony exploded as it hit the grenade, a one in a million shot that could have gone either way.  
He felt nothing, no joy, and a complete absence of victory; he just ducked under the shelter of the piece of wall as the balcony collapsed over enemies, over cars out in the street, over the hiding pedestrians. His heart did not falter, his breathing did not become erratic, he did not develop tunnel vision - all he did was watch it happen in front of his eyes, broken concrete, body parts and all. Collateral.  
There was nothing that shifted at all inside him.   
  
He waited for the tower to collapse, and, with the ringing in his ears still singing a tune in his head, he half stood up and watched the disaster he left in his wake.  
Behind him, Lynch was yelling.  
Something about _what the fuck was he doing, they could have all died_ , that sort of stuff. He could hear it with his left ear, faintly, but not with his right. He turned around after assessing there was nothing left to shoot at and he paced towards the armored car, pushing Lynch out of his way with a steady jerk of the back of his rifle straight into his chest. His tac vest took most of the shock, but it was enough to shut him up.  
Around him, everyone else was gathering themselves up from the ground and from under or around the car. He ignored them as well and headed towards the driver. Kuznetsov was just pushing himself back into the seat after having spent the entire exchange of shooting pleasantries from behind the passenger door, attempting cover fire for him, while he’d advanced towards their attackers at a steady pace. He didn't need to be told Kuznetsov did that, instinctively, he just knew.  
Kuznetsov's eyes were terribly blue and they looked strange on his face in that moment, skin flushed red from adrenaline as it was. He trusted him the most, not because he was a remarkable human being, but because he was ruthless and you could measure his height on par with his crazy. Sometimes you needed a little crazy by your side.   
  
The Russian settled back in his seat, placing his rifle on the passenger’s seat and nodded at him:  
“Package secure” he said, accent thick under his husky voice. His lips were moist with sweat, and he could still smell the cigarette Kuznetsov was smoking before they got shot at, on his breath.   
His high cheekbones glistened with sweat over a jaw sharp enough to cut. He would have gladly fucked him, if Kuznetsov would have so been inclined, but neither of them had ever offered.  
He lifted a gloved hand in the air and rotated it loosely, signaling everyone to gather their bearings and go. He glanced towards the backseat. The mother and daughter were secure, albeit scared out of their wits and crying. But the Minister would get them back without a scratch where he was waiting at the Farah Airport, sipping on his import coffee and smoking his expensive cigarettes.  
Should have jacked up the price. No one in their right mind would have taken the trip from Kandahar to Farah with such a delicate package. Over 300 clicks through open desert.  
The mother was yammering at him, screaming. He didn’t quite speak the language but he got the gist of it.  
He didn’t bother and simply pretended they didn’t exist.   
  
Everyone else was already back into the other three convoy cars and they started driving again, one after another, in the same order they had begun their journey, with the package car in the middle. Behind them, Lynch was at the wheel. Pavel was back to his usual spot above, on the turret, feet covered up to his ankles with the remnants of all the bullets he'd fired. He looked at them in the rearview mirror as Kuznetsov pressed the gas, getting them out of there as fast as he could.  
He wiped his face with his scarf, rifle resting between his legs.   
Only Bakwa left, and then maybe 20 more minutes until they’d reach the airport, release the package and have 10,000 dollars each more in their accounts.   
He should have asked for more.  
“You think they send message to Bakwa?” Kuznetsov asked, eyes shifting from the road to the mirrors, focused, attentive.   
He’d slept for 4 hours every night for a week and was functioning exclusively on a diet of coffee and bland sandwiches, but he was alert as hell. That kind of crazy confidence and focus stirred something in his groin and he shifted uncomfortably in his seat, his tac vest strangling him. It was not the first time it happened around Kuznetsov, so he had gotten really good at ignoring the feeling.   
“Nah,” he replied “because we’re not going through Bakwa. When we start to see the mountains, we’re going to steer to the right. There is a mountain pass we can go through, I've been there before, months ago when you were back home in Novgorod. There’s no roads so it’s going to be a bumpy ride but these cars can take it.”  
“Risky.” the comment came, tinged with sarcasm, but only on the edges.  
He half turned in his seat and offered a look that Kuznetsov knew too well. It was the ‘ _are we gonna fuck about or what_ ’ look that his driver knew very well and Kuznetsov grinned mischievously in a way that reminded him of a brother he once had.That grin spread all the way up to his ears.  
“We might get ambushed and die.” He insisted with the look and he got the same look in return. “I like it, Thor Odinsson.”

  


* * *

  
  
  
  
Much to Kuznetsov’s dismay, there was no ambush, so he was lighting up a cigarette for Thor instead, as they watched the package being herded into a private airplane and fucking off to another shit hole of a location to then be eventually delivered to Europe, or wherever it was that corrupt politicians went in order to avoid their fuckups and demand political asylum in exchange for information.  
The evening stretched ahead of them with the deceitful peacefulness of the desert. A blanket of purple and pink was covering the sky inch by inch as the airport lights were turning on one by one.  
  
The British and U.S soldiers walking about kept throwing them annoyed glances.  
Thor and the rest of his crew ignored them - the fight was out of him for the day. As long as he knew it in his heart that, at their core, soldiers and mercenaries were actually not all that different, that was all that mattered. Thor had read the history books. He read the news. The biographies. Watched the documentaries.  
He’d done his homework.  
  
The sky was partially purple somewhere in the general direction of the distant mountains, blending in with the blood orange above their heads, a remnant of the day, as he took a long, deep drag from his cigarette.   
Kuznetsov was perched up on the hood of the Jeep, feet planted on the metal guard, and he sat casually next to Thor, who was leaning into it. They both had gotten rid of their tactical vests a while ago and had been smoking in silence for a while.   
Pavel was in the next car, trying to Skype his wife in Romania but the Airport’s wifi was less than decent. He’d put a photo of her and their baby boy on the dashboard awhile ago. It was tattered and he’d spilled coffee over it at one point but it was sacred enough that none of them even dared make a joke about it. The rest of the guys, Lynch, Sajak, Miller and Bog were inside the airport, half of them trying to get the few women working inside to exchange more than a word with them while the others were scouting for coffee and candy bars.  
  
Kuznetsov shifted on the hood of the Jeep, rummaging for another cigarette.  
“How we return to Kabul now? Take the long way around?”  
Thor looked up at him. His dark brown hair was fading to black in the dimming light, his shoulders surrounded by a halo of mountains and purple lights. In the distance, a few stars had started to shimmer faintly, blinking in an out like a Morse code from the Heavens. The Russian's lips were pale and chapped and he still had some dirt on his cheek from earlier that day when he'd touched his face while fixing something on the car. Thor almost stretched his hand out to clean it before he stopped himself from making a huge mistake; it would mean compromising a good friendship that had taken years to cultivate. He was good at that, not compromising relationships, not telling the truth about what he felt, he thought bitterly.  
He’d had to have a good talk to himself, to convince himself that the reason why he was closest to the Russian was not because his features reminded him of Loki, but because he was crazy, capable, cold as ice under pressure and intelligent.  
“Yeah, long way around – Herat, Majari Sharif. If we leave at 600 hours, we can make it into Kabul by 1700 hours, provided we don’t make any unnecessary stops.” Thor nodded, mostly to himself. Normally, they would have gone back the same way they came, but they might expect retaliation if they took the same way back around. It did not matter they no longer were in possession of the package. The people of that country were really good at retaliation.   
Thor got it.  
He understood it.  
  


* * *

  
  
  
They slept in the airport that night, camped out between dirty, broken seats, almost emptying the only vending machine available inside. Thor sat next to the door and smoked for a while, long after everyone else was asleep. Kuznetsov’s face was clear in the neon lights and Thor was always taken aback by how much younger he looked when he slept, the lines on his face rearranging, his lips curling into a lazy half pout.  
He was 31 regardless, but looked at least ten years younger and, as his face changed in his sleep, he might as well had been a teenager, in spite of his wide shoulders and heavyset arms.  
  
Thor looked away and back to the stars. Checked his watch. It was officially the 17th of April. Three years to the date when he dropped face down onto Earth. Three years to the date since he could not lift Mjolnir anymore.   
Three years to the date since Agent Coulson asked him what branch of the military he was and he had no idea what a ‘military’ was.   
Three years to the date since he last saw Loki.  
Three years to the date since he had to adapt to living in a world he had only a basic understanding of.  
  
He did not know how to do anything else, you see. Except fighting and drinking and fucking. When he’d told Coulson this, two weeks after the entire mess, when they could sit down and talk and his truth did not sound like the ravings of a lunatic anymore, Coulson suggested the army. “ _I can talk to some people, pull a few strings_ ” he’d said. All he asked in exchange was some information on the hammer. Thor had laughed, wholeheartedly so, and told him. Regardless of their attempts, no one could move it, they even tried blasting the entire place, to no avail.  
Eventually, they settled into building a small structure around it, for no other reason than for it not to fall into the wrong hands. Thor had tried explaining it to them that there were no other hands Mjolnir could fall into except his own, but humans are distrustful and they believe they know better. So Coulson kept a watch over Mjolnir and provided Thor with a fictitious life, a birth certificate and a military career.  
  
Too bad Thor’s distaste for authority had crumbled that change to smithereens. You don’t just _punch_ a superior officer in the throat.  
He had assumed he was as invincible as he always had been but day by day, his hope that anyone would come, that Odin would have changed his mind about banishing him, all those tiny specks of hope he could muster were slowly eaten away by the rushing of days of the mortal life. Coulson had granted him access to Mjolnir whenever he wanted and Thor had spent countless hours trying  
to lift it.  
Gradually, he came around less and less, until his hope had faded completely. He took the decision not to return to it again. He could not bear the shame of watching it, of feeling Mjolnir watching him with adamant disapproval and complete disappointment. He turned his face away from Asgard and tried his best to look the mortal life in the eyes, and what he saw was not to his liking. He saw a world torn at the seams by mistakes that were repeated to exhaustion by men who were less than righteous. And he saw righteous men who stood idly by and did nothing.   
The more he watched, the more he wanted to scream, to stand upright in the middle of it all and demand a change, but he was now mortal and small, and the space he occupied in the Universe had diminished considerably. The more he saw, the more silent he became, with bitterness frothing around his mouth. He saw death and destruction, he saw abuse and torture, he saw corruption dripping on the edges of all societies around the world and he could not bring himself to see a glimmer of hope in the murky depths of the Earth.  
  
He had no guide in the world, and Coulson only mined him for information that he could not really use, so he too, let him go, for what is there to a God who had lost his grace? What does he have to offer?  
Without a guide, Thor turned his attention to the only thing he ever knew best: conflict.  
He did some reading. Talked to people.  
 _Fighting, drinking and fucking._  
 _Fighting, drinking and fucking._  
He could not be a soldier, he knew that, but, he realized, he could become the corrupted image of one. He went into the headquarters of the Blackpool Defense Services with nothing to his name but an ID created by Coulson and punched and kicked his way through their training program like a knife through butter, that’s how easy it was.   
That's how easy it was, when, what felt like lifetimes ago, he had wielded power beyond any human imagination, when he could have thundered his way through a fight.  
What did a mortal body mean in front of mortal enemies? He’d only known genuine fear in battle when he was a child. With hundreds of years of fighting experience in and out of dimensions, fear had been reduced to a tiny speck of somewhat mediocre worry somewhere in the back of his mind. Its meaning had been desecrated and mutilated, lost through experience. Perhaps he looked suicidal, but his focused gaze let them understand he knew exactly what he was doing.  
  
He was shipped off to Sierra Leone in the blink of an eye and within the year, he’d become the most sought after contractor they had. They sent him to Kosovo for three months and then delivered him to Colombia where he’d spent the most part of a year, protecting convoys carrying boxes he was not allowed to know the contents of.   
Didn’t he want to go home? His fellow mercenaries asked.   
He'd seen the aftermath of a building tattered with blood. They had hauled out the bodies after the suicide bombing, but the walls were still stained and there were still pieces of bone, brain and flesh all across the carpets. He saw people hanging on bridges in Colombia, throats slashed open, their tongues, pulled down through the cuts in their necks, lolling helplessly in the wind.  
This was his home, this blood, this mutilation of the human spirit. It was what he understood now.  
  
He asked Blackpool to ship him off to the next place they needed a mercenary as soon as his contract ended, and they heeded his wishes with a smile on their faces, thinking of all the thousands of dollars he was putting into their fat pockets on a weekly basis.  
Odinsson, as his name was written in his ID, either had no desire to live, or was just the luckiest bastard in the company. They nicknamed him _Immortal_ and he found it ridiculous.  
It gets like that, luck, when you’ve been fighting for hundreds of years and the movement of a body in a fight doesn’t hold any secrets for you anymore. He was not going to lie - fighting like this, with guns and tanks and turrets was different, especially in a body that was not as strong or invincible as before, but it was not at all impossible. It came easy to him, almost frighteningly natural.  
  
He’d met Kuznetsov on the second part of his year in Colombia and they’d been inseparable ever since. Thor hand picked the man to join him the next year in Iraq, and, after a short layover with his family in Novgorod, he joined Thor and his crew in Basrah.  
Kuznetsov was old for his age, barely 29 when they met, with a note of weariness in his eyes that sometimes translated in the slouch of his shoulders. But he was quick on his feet and he was the one who taught Thor Arabic, before Thor managed to start picking it up by himself. It was easy on his tongue and the understanding came naturally, even without his abilities, all of them so aptly taken away by Odin when he had been banished.  
Thor in exchange, taught him to fight. Not the stuff they showed to him on TV but stuff that was actually useful in close combat, and Kuznetsov sucked it all up like a sponge. He was swift, and, though he was as tall as Thor, he was leaner, and when he fought, a look, much like a hungry predator, set all across his face and made him beautiful in the same way dangerous things usually are. Somehow, they brought in the best in each other, and Frigga had taught Thor there were no better people to have around, so Thor kept him close.  
He dragged Kuznetsov along everywhere and by now the Russian was sending so much money back to his family they were considering moving to Moscow and he wanted to buy his parents a home.  
  
He liked Kuznetsov.   
Thor liked him a lot. He liked how his grin showed up just mere seconds before he was about to do something utterly and completely dumb and dangerous. He liked his eyes, blue tinged with a shade of green, like lakes that reflect the forest around them. The curve of his neck and his deep laugh.  
His lips curling around a cigarette. He liked the way he got excited at the prospect of danger and how he seemed unaffected by all the death around him. He chewed up fear and spat it out onto the desert, even when he was genuinely afraid.  
Thor could have fallen in love with him, with this Makar Kuznetsov, if only he would have allowed Thor to.  
  
He fiddled with the breast pocket of his shirt until he found his pack of cigarettes. A dreadful habit he could not rid himself of.   
Something spoke to him in between the bitter taste and the thick waves of smoke, though he couldn’t exactly put his finger on what it was and what exactly it was telling him. So he stopped asking.  
He’d tried something similar with Loki once, when they were younger. It was an herb of sorts from another planet, when they went to visit during one of their many escapades before they started to become estranged, as life started to turn them in different directions.  
Thor remembered something about a glass bottle that was not really glass and had an elastic feel to it. It was filled with a smoke the people of that planet collected from the open mouth of a plant that bloomed only seasonally. They sucked from it as they would through a pipe: the smoke was fragrant, aromatic, heavy on the mouth and throat. It tasted like many things at once, like fruit and ash and something else, much sweeter.  
Loki had a field day with it, working his fingers around it deftly, using what little magic he knew back then to create shapes and make them move, reenacting historical events and, when Thor got bored of history, battles with creatures beyond Thor’s imagination.  
Thor remembered watching Loki through that thick haze of smoke, his eyes glistening green, so green they were almost fluorescent, twirling in the midst of the smoke like he was smoke himself too and he envied his brother’s ability to be so agile in such a graceful way, and he loved watching him create, sprout life and story from nothing at all. He thought back then -he remembered clearly, even up to this day, that feeling- that he was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.  
  
Thor, the Thor of now, took a deep drag from the cigarette, digging a hand in his pocket as a neon light outside shimmered, and then went out, the lightbulb inside crackling an electric death. There was no light on his face now and he was free to watch the stars shimmer. Somewhere in between them, he saw the blinking light of an airplane above the distant mountains.   
It was an inhale of shame, that long cigarette drag. Shame at a memory he would never share with anyone, not because there was anything wrong with it but because that was when he realized that what he felt for his brother was not very brotherly at all.  
He ran a hand through his hair and pulled it tighter in a knot that hung loose on the back of his head. He didn’t have it in him to cut it, not just yet. Loki had loved to play in his hair when they were young, ever so attentive to the way Thor presented himself to the world, tying it in complex plaits that were only depicted in the oldest Asgardian traditions. It was the only thing he had left to drag Loki’s memory along with him, tattered and torn at the seams, like a used rag doll.  
He’d given up a lot of things: hope being one, but he was unable to pull away from Loki. He had a leash on him tied so closely to Loki’s hand that Thor could sometimes swear he felt its tug even from dimensions away. He never liked to admit it, definitely not to anyone else and not to himself too often either, that Loki had a hold on him and that hold was there simply because _Thor loved him,_ with all the sick implications of that fact.  
  
It took him a Colombian forest and an Iraqi desert to bring all that love to the surface, loud and clear as day. To look at himself in the eye in the mirror and admit it to himself that the love he had for his brother was not brotherly and that it transcended understanding.   
No, he shook his head, it did not transcend a single god damn fucking thing - he loved him, he lusted after him like any other man would lust for another man or woman they found attractive and intriguing and beautiful.   
He longed for his touch, to feel his black hair between his hands, he longed to touch his skin and he imagined how it would be to have Loki under him, naked and willing, flush with desire. He'd thought about it many times and every single time, he'd done his best to erase the images he'd seen from his memory.   
  
When he’d last seen Loki, in the SHIELD facility they’d kept him in, when Loki told him goodbye, he barely had it in him not to ask him for a touch. Not a kiss, it would have been too much, but at least a caress, a hand through his hair for the last time.  
He’d tried to imagine it with all the mortal bodies that crossed his bed through his years as a mortal, closed his eyes and imagined Loki in their stead, but none had the light-as-air quality about them that Loki’s fingers had, and in all the perfumes he had smelled, none smelled like Loki, a fragrance deeper than musk and wilder than raging oceans.   
  
He searched for Loki in all the human things he could think of and only found specks of him, too far removed to mean a thing, but he hung onto them desperately, like he did with his cigarettes, urging Loki to appear in the midst of the thick smoke and make it come alive with stories.  
  
He felt like dying out of love and all the words he’d left unsaid.

  



	2. Chapter 2

Thor could hear Pavel argue with Bog about carbonara pasta. He couldn't hear them very well so he was not quite sure what the purpose of the argument was.  
He was in the back of the Jeep, a space normally occupied by the other two and was laying down next to the turret, with the strong afternoon Afghan sun beating on his face. He’d put his scarf over his head, hoping to catch some sleep, but even in his advanced state of fatigue, he was barely able to, dozing in and out of half-remembered dreams. It didn’t help that the highway was unkempt and tattered with potholes.  
Behind their car, Kuznetsov was driving second in row. Thor was supposed to watch the turret in Pavel’s stead but he'd hardly slept at all in the past few days and that stretch of road had never caused them any trouble before.   
Kuznetsov was blasting some music in the Jeep and he waved at Thor when he saw him sitting up. The Russian’s hair had twisted into a fluffed, half-curled mess that stood perched up on the top of his head because of the way he’d slept the night before. He was not hearing the end of it from any of them that day.  
Thor turned the PTT on and radioed him, speaking into the microphone attached to the shoulder of his tac vest:  
“It’s honestly a sore you’re the first thing I have to see when I wake up.”  
He saw Kuznetsov laugh behind the wheel and then the Russian offered him the finger, ever so elegantly.  
“Am I offending your aesthetic sensibilities?” the radio crackled with Kuznetsov’s voice in his ear.  
"Wow, two new words added to your vocabulary? Impressive” Thor asked, genuinely surprised. Kuznetsov’s English was far from bad, but he used simple words and stayed away from any literary ambitions.  
“Come again?”  
“I said: you have until this evening to unfuck your hair, it’s a disgrace.” Thor replied and from behind the steering wheel, Kuznetsov mocked a military salute in his direction. Thor grinned and looked away from him, turning his attention towards the seemingly endless mountain range spreading to his left, then at the seemingly endless mountain range spreading to his right.  
  
They had left Panjab behind two hours before, with its small villages and mountains that had blissfully offered some relief from the sun. Still a dangerous place to be – they pressed the pedals hard to get out of there as soon as they could. Enclosed spaces were not necessarily safe spaces and Thor, appointed a long time ago the de-facto leader of the pack, had been on full alert the entire time they crossed the area.  
Now they had three more hours to Kabul and it was all green, silent hills from then on, as they joined the A77. Thor stood up when they did so, putting his helmet on and taking his place behind the turret.The traffic would become somewhat more intense from then on and the risk of IED's was high. The Afghans who wanted them out did not differentiate between them and the military, they looked similar and did the same things, as far as they were concerned.  
Thor would be the last person to disagree, but it did not mean he would hesitate to shoot, if provoked.  
  
He tapped the top of the car with his fist when he saw smoke on the horizon:  
“Pavel! Back on the turret!” he ordered, leaning into the passenger's window, and Bog stopped the car.  
While Pavel was getting out, Thor grabbed his sniper rifle and used the scope to peer into the distance. He saw U.S Military cars surrounding the highway, people moving about. It looked like the party was over, but it didn’t mean they were going to be careless. Pavel geared up, helmet on over his black hair. With his scarf wrapped tight around his mouth and eyes shielded by sunglasses, you could not even guess his features anymore.  
Kuznetsov stopped as well and Thor got in the passenger’s seat next to him.  
“There’s smoke on the horizon,” Thor radioed in to all of them “I’m taking lead. Stay frosty.” He said, signaling Kuznetsov to go ahead. The Russian overtook Bog by going slightly off the highway, setting their car as leader.  
Kuznetsov was playing loud music in in the car, lazy guitar riffs accompanied by a male voice that was singing about witches and Jupiter.  
“What is this one?” Thor asked, planting the rifle between his legs and turning the volume down.  
“Stoner rock.” Neither of those words meant anything to Thor. He nodded absently.  
  
When their small convoy reached the smoldering piece of rubble on the highway, they stopped to attention and one of the soldiers walked over to them, slightly annoyed.  
“What’s going on?” Kuznetsov asked.  
“Muj tried to drive a car into an APC heading into Kabul with a bunch of Embeds. Got shot at and exploded before reaching target, asshole was too dumb to time the bomb right, so he went to pieces into civilian cars instead. Just that now we’re left with this clusterfuck,” he opened the arm not holding his rifle, wide, encompassing the entire area “while waiting for Medevac for the civilians.”  
Thor looked over the soldier’s shoulder and saw, in the midst of the upturned cars, a few people scattered about on the highway, soldiers hovering around the burning car without doing anything to stop the fire.   
Beyond the remnant of a car, he could see a soldier try to CPR a body, red and scorched by the fire. The movement was rhythmical, there was no panic, no hope. Going through the motions.  
“What unit are you fellas with?” the soldier asked, looking at their car, trying to find some ranks, some insignia he might recognize. But he knew the answer by the time he ended his question.  
“None, we’re Blackpool.” Kuznetsov said.  
The soldier took a step back with a slight frown set on his face:   
“Well then what’s going on here is none of your business. Carry on.” He said, pointing them in the general direction of Kabul.  
  
Kuznetsov gave him a mock-salute as he started the car, avoiding the cordoned off area by getting off the highway and into the dirt, which offered Thor a wider view of what was going on.  
A woman was holding on to her child, crying, the child only half aware of what was happening. She was flanked by a soldier who leaned in to touch her shoulder perhaps, maybe give her some reassurance, before he remembered why it was a bad idea to touch a woman in this country, under any circumstance.  
The soldier doing CPR seemed to have given up and was leaning into his hands, wiping his forehead. The Embeds on the other hand, were all around the place, cameras in their shaky hands, vests hanging loosely over their torsos with the inscription PRESS plastered on the chest.  
Like vultures, they hovered over the dead bodies, knelt down next to the flames to feed themselves with the best shot they could get. It was eerie to watch the entire scene as it unfolded under the heat of the Afghan sun, as they slowly went around it, with Kuznetsov’s music playing from the stereo. It was a juxtaposition so strange it could have almost belonged in a dream.  
A woman with a camera was talking to the soldier Kuznetsov had been addressed by moments before. She looked over her shoulder at their small convoy while the soldier seemed to explain to her who they were, and she lifted the camera to her eyes.  
Thor looked away because he seemed to have been the one she’d focused it on, as they were going around the disaster on the left side. Kuznetsov noticed it too and, at the same time Thor turned his face away, he leaned in towards the passenger seat window, steering with only his left hand, and served her with his middle finger.  
Thor let out a snort.  
“ _Classy_.” Thor said, glancing at Kuznetsov and the Russian shrugged.  
“I don’t say I come here for great things, Thor. I never say to my mother ‘mom, I go to Afghanistan to change the world for the better’, you know? But these reporters do, and they think they are better than us when they hover over dead bodies to win a Pulitzer. What’s a Pulitzer good for? Shove it up your ass, maybe.” he gesticulated with his fingers going up and down on the steering wheel “I come here for money and to shoot guns, I’m not going to lie, you know? But these people? So self righteous. I hate reporters.”   
“Well, _duly noted_.” Thor sniggered.

  


* * *

  
  
They reached Kabul close to nightfall and Miller was relieved because one thing Miller hated was driving black on black with night vision goggles on.  
They stayed at the same place: The Safi Guesthouse, a place paid for by Blackpool where they occasionally crossed paths with other fellow contractors working in various areas in or out of Kabul. This time though it was just them, and, after they parked their cars in the inner yard and acknowledged their presence to Tawfiq, the owner, they finally headed for their rooms, one more cramped than the other, neither overlooking the street, only the inner yard.  
  
To finally get clean and shower felt like a luxurious indulgence at that point and Thor relished in it. He’d tossed all of his clothes onto the floor, taking something off with each step he took closer to the bathroom.  
He tossed his backpack on the floor, next to the bed. His helmet was perched on the lamp on the nightstand. Sajak, being the artistic type that he was, had doodled on all of their helmets during long stays in the desert or on bases, in the absence of anything better to do. He’d asked Thor if there was anything in particular he would like to have on his helmet.  
Thor had shrugged and almost told him to draw whatever but then he remembered how much of a bad idea that could turn out to be so he rectified his shrug with _“A snake”_. Sajak had nodded pensively, and now Thor had a small curling snake drawn on the side of his helmet, a black contour colored in the same shade as the desert. Sajak said he would have used nicer colors but they would have made him into an easy target.  
He’d wanted to say ‘ _let them come at me_ ’, but he remembered walls and cars smeared with blood and he reconsidered. He was fragile now, even if he had a hard time remembering it sometimes. _Human._  
Thor looked at the helmet as he took off the last of his shirts. His entire outfit smelled like sweat, dirt and cigarettes.  
  
He turned on the shower, allowing the bathroom to steam first and he caught a glance of himself in the mirror.  
He ran a hand through his greasy hair, that now reached down way past his shoulders. His beard was thicker, it was unkempt and, just like his hair, it had settled into a dark honey color, vastly different from how golden both his hair and beard used to be when he was almost God-King.  
He brushed it down with his hand, following his own body with his eyes, his shoulders, arms as strong as they had always been, ridiculous tan lines all of them had, a body tattered with scars that did not heal anymore. His body looked a bit older now. Heavy lines had set in the corners of his eyes and around his mouth. The combination of tan skin, wrinkles and dark honey blonde hair made him look cold, distant, focused. It was a good look to have in the place he was at in life.  
His mind went to Loki, wondering where Loki was in _his_ life, how he was faring, dimensions away, sharing the same Cosmos that was not, at the same time, the same Cosmos Thor occupied, small as a speck of dust as he was.  
  
Had he plunged Asgard in disarray? How much peace had he brought? How much war? Did he go head to head with the Jotun? Did he _win_? Who shared his bed if he didn’t win and who shared it if he did? Surely, as King of Asgard, it would be unacceptable for him to stay a lone King for too long.  
Thor had anger fucked before, in this mortal life he now owned. Every time he thought about Loki having his pick of a consort and giving her his body, he got increasingly angrier. Sometimes he did it on purpose, while flirting with someone, man or woman, it did not matter, just so he could take it all out on their body, release all that anger and frustration as they writhed under him, twisting the sheets, sometimes in pain, other times in pleasure. Some were into that pain, others kicked him out of bed. Others, more astute, told him to work out whatever issues he had somewhere else.  
  
He stepped into the shower, allowing the hot water to wash all over him before he ran his wet hands through his hair. How did one unfuck themselves from a love bordering obsession that they had harvested and maintained for hundreds of years?  
It was only in the light of human life that Thor had the time to ponder deeply about the life he’d had before this other one. The more time he spent hacking away with a machete through the Colombian forests, or driving across Sierra Leone in the back of a Humvee with no other company but the wind, the more his mind stopped occupying the large spaces it used to, the large spaces that allowed him a lot more room to play, to forget, to not think too much about things.  
He felt his humanity and he felt how constricting his body was becoming, how his mind had now rooms, instead of large halls.  
He was forgetting Asgard.  
He knew the _idea_ of it, he knew _of it_ and he knew his own story, but his human mind could not comprehend the cosmic laws it worked on, its _vastness_ , anymore. The memory of his father, larger than life itself, was compressed into the simple image of a man on a throne and in that image, Thor saw Odin as he was – a father with high expectations and a man of great ambition. A man who would not be denied.  
A man holding up a son, giving him to the world.  
  
Thor had never hated his father, but suddenly, he found himself resenting him. Standing in his glow, Thor had never seen the great shadow he was casting behind him, and he suddenly felt the weight of a great deal many things he found hard to explain. He’d lost Loki in the midst of all that glow, Loki who was wilting in both their shadows but who had found a way to grow eventually, adapting to the lack of light as he always found a way to adapt to any situation.  
Odin had nurtured a son and forgot to give to the other, and Thor remembered the way Odin sometimes looked at Loki, as if his face left him with a bad taste in his mouth. Thor had not seen that glance addressed to himself, ever, but when he did, during his banishment he realized it was something constant in Loki's life, which he had learned to live with.  
And even so, Loki had not been reckless.   
  
Loki had tried to give him counsel, time and time again, until his counsel was only encouraging Thor to attempt ridiculous things. Perhaps Loki has thought that, by making stupid mistakes, Thor would learn, since he obviously never listened. Then he’d made the worst of mistakes, and not only he would never see Asgard again, but neither would he touch Loki.  
He backtracked, thinking of when was the last time he did, and it was right before they had landed on Jotunheim, when he’d put a hand on Loki's shoulder and squeezed it as he spoke of destroying Jotuns and imparting justice and whatnot, all those great big words which painted an ideal that was completely superficial.  
He did not know the heavy weight of justice before he came to Earth, and saw it misused, tampered with and abused.  
He did not know how easily it could be compromised, turning a good thing into a bad one. Human justice had hard edges, and it was almost always double sided. Thor had seen himself as righteous, as thoroughly worthy, only because his worthiness was measured according to Odin's rules.  
  
Loki had been unworthy because he played with magic? Because he was a little more fragile and bookish? It had not mattered to Odin that Loki had all the makings of a great diplomat. Odin wanted a blinding greatness in his stead on the throne, molded out of himself, made in his own image.  
Thor had blindly stumbled into Odin's greatness, taking it all for granted and not thinking twice of the mess he was leaving behind. Pride, glory, victory. Those words now made bile rise in his throat.  
He'd learned to speak less like an Asgardian and curse easily, how long until he learned enough thinking was... enough? That what was done was done and he could not take it back?  
  
He pressed his fists in his eyes until he saw white stars through the blackness. It did not do him well to think too much and he suddenly did not want to be there anymore, naked under the comfort of warm water, but back in the shit, searching for muzzle flashes, preferably at night, when he had to be twice as alert.  
Anywhere where he would not have to think.  
He knew he fucked up. He knew he lost everything.   
He knew he would never see Loki again and he knew he loved him and he had felt guilt and shame at that for hundreds of years, but he would gladly yell it out to the world now, if it only meant he got to be around him for just a while longer.  
How did Loki’s fingers felt on his hair? He remembered it well, how he stood behind him in his room, overlooking the gardens, in a canopy bed large enough for four people. Loki had stood behind him on the bed, his fingers trailing from his forehead all the way down to the tips of his golden locks, massaging his scalp pleasantly as he did that. It made his entire head buzz with pleasure.  
He remembered how painfully Loki tugged at his hair to create the designs he was so fond of and how he rested his hands on Thor’s shoulders as he admired his handiwork.  
  
More than once, Thor imagined what would have happened if he would have turned around and faced him, their faces just a breath away. What would have happened if he would have just leaned in a bit closer and touched his lips, always set in a straight line as if they were standing for attention. As if they were fighting against saying something that should not be said.  
Thor was ready to risk it now, tired and sleepy from the trip, from the five months he had been in Afghanistan. But it was too late to risk anything other than his life anymore.  
He had nothing of Loki but a memory and he realized that, with his now all too human mind, soon enough he would start to forget his face as the years would pass and the decay of the human brain would get to him too.  
Every day, Thor thought about Loki and when he had a moment's respite, he imagined him in detail, every line of his face, every lock of his hair he could have committed to memory through the years, he imagined it all as clearly as he could, afraid that one day he would have nothing to hold on to but a vague silhouette of a man with green eyes and black hair.  
  
He imagined him now, as the bathroom was steaming up, fogging the shower door and the mirror, how he had seen him once by the lake in the forest beyond the palace.  
They were slowly turning from being children into men, but Loki still loved to escape the palace through passages only he knew of, on paths unmarked to anyone's eyes but his own. He remembered how they stood by the lake as night fell. It was warm and peaceful and Loki had shown Thor how he commanded fireflies and Thor had laughed at all the glowing orbs chasing all around them. They had jumped in the lake that night, and Thor remembered Loki's face, illuminated by the bioluminescent plants growing on the bottom.  
Thor remembered the gentle curves of his shoulders and how delicate his neck looked, his wet hair slicked back, away from his face. His beautiful face, all angles, cheekbones and pale shimmers, in full view.  
Thor recalled the way his body moved underwater, how he chased him in between the plants shimmering electric blue and how he watched his hips move gracefully through them. A different type of strength than Thor's.  
He remembered how tempted he had been that night to take his face between his hands and kiss it, kiss all of it, his mouth, his eyes, his cheeks, his hair. How his love for Loki felt that night, an immense thing twisting and coiling in his chest. It was love, so much love and it was lust too.  
  
Thor's hand crossed his stomach and went between his legs, taking a hold of his cock, squeezing it tightly.  
It was enough to think about Loki's body to get him hard. It was enough to imagine tracing his lips across his chest and hip bones, enough to imagine burying his face between his legs, nose burrowing in the dark hair beneath his navel; breathing him in, making him writhe with pleasure under his mouth.  
He steadied himself with one hand on the wall, moving his other hand up and down across his throbbing cock, imagining the same thing he had imagined a million times over, with the same intensity as ever. His hand slipped, and he leaned his forearm into the wall instead, his forehead pressing on it as he gasped for air, faster and faster in the boiling heat of the shower, until he came all over the wall, holding his voice in.  
Thor stood there under the hot drops of water with his eyes closed for a moment, basking in the aftermath, before he allowed shame and guilt to cover him once again.  
  
What right did he have to do this with Loki's memory? He could forgive himself back when they were side by side, when they occupied the same space. But not now. Not now when he was supposed to keep the memories he had alive, close to his chest, because he was not going to make new ones of Loki anymore.  
What a piece of shit he had become.  
He let the water wash away the cum stained wall and he pinched the bridge of his nose, forcing whatever wanted to come out from behind his eyelids to stay the fuck in.  
Kuznetsov’s voice broke through and woke him up from his sorrows:  
“ _Thor!_ ” he yelled from beyond the door. They were always in each other’s rooms, his crew, so it came as no surprise to hear him.  
“What?”  
“Tawfiq say they opened up this place next to the Star Hotel that you used to go to. Want to grab some drinks? Bog and Lynch said they'll be coming as well.”  
Thor turned the shower off and wrapped a towel around himself, opening the door. Kuznetsov was standing in the doorway, fresh out of the shower himself, wearing black cargo pants and a black tshirt. He was leaning into his arm, perched above his head into the door frame and he looked absolutely ravishing.  
Thor thought it, but with Loki fresh in his mind, he couldn't give himself the comfort of taking in the Russian at the moment. Thor ran a hand through his wet hair:  
“Which one? Sadiqqi’s?”  
“Think that’s the one. Where some guy was selling cocaine last time, Tawfiq said.”  
“Yeah, that’s the one. Give me a few minutes to get dressed.” He said, grabbing another towel and trying to pat his hair dry.  
Kuznetsov moved from the doorway, making room for him and planted himself next to the bed, turning on the lamp Thor’s helmet was perched on. He held the helmet between his hands, turning it around between his fingers while Thor was rummaging through his backpack for something decent to wear that did not completely stink of death.  
“Why you get this snake?” the Russian asked, pointing the helmet in Thor’s general direction.   
“I like snakes.”  
“Do you?”  
Thor pulled out a black t-shirt from the bottom of his backpack, alongside the only pair of jeans he owned.  
“Yeah,” and because he was weary and had a weight pressing on his chest, he added: “they remind me of my brother.”  
“I did not know you have a brother.”  
“He’s really far away, we don’t talk anymore.”  
“Why?”  
Thor shrugged.  
“I did something stupid and now he has to take care of my mess, I think. “   
“You sound like you miss him.”  
  
Thor pulled the t-shirt on and the towel off as well. They’d all seen each other naked more than once at various points during their missions, so it didn’t make much of a difference, but Kuznetsov’s eyes wandered across his body in a way they had not before and Thor realized it was actually the first time he was naked in front of him with no one else around.  
He pulled his boxers on, and then the jeans.   
“He had his faults, but he is my brother and I always cared about him. So yeah, I do miss him.” He paused, undecided. “But I’d rather not talk about it.” Kuznetsov placed the helmet on the bed, nodding at Thor but saying nothing.  
The silence between them was uncomfortable, so Thor decided to end it and waved his hand in his direction:  
“Come on, let’s fuck off and get some drinks.”  
“Cocaine too?”  
Thor snorted and shoved him aggressively out the door “No, asshole, no cocaine!”

  


* * *

  
  
  
It was nearing midnight when Thor felt like he was slightly waking up from the tipsy state he had tried to induce himself into.  
Saddiqi was at the bar, pouring drinks and the basement, aptly transformed into the semblance of a club, was so thick with cigarette smoke he could cut through it with a knife. The air conditioning almost never worked, even though you could hear the clunky machinery whirr away in a corner constantly.   
Bog was playing cards with a group of soldiers at a faraway table and Lynch was trying to get under the skirts of a journalist lady with curly brown hair. She needed to be way more drunk than she was to even consider giving him a chance.  
  
There were traditional Afghan carpets on the walls and all the tables were occupied, the basement having reached its full capacity about ten people ago. It was packed with a mix of soldiers, journalists and contractors like himself and the occasional Afghan translator.  
The music, mostly American, mostly classic rock, flooded the basement, playing over the conversations but Thor didn’t need to hear their discussions, he knew them by heart – a mix of things they missed about home, how shit Kabul was and the war.  
That was all you were going to hear about at those tables, so he’d collapsed on a sofa with his beer and pretended to watch CNN on the plasma TV set up on the wall. He had no idea where Kuznetsov had disappeared.  
Someone was smoking weed and it was getting him a little high as well. His throat was tinged with a slight feel of nausea. Which one of them was awake enough to drive them back to Tawfiq’s? He needed some goddamn air before he puked all over the table.  
  
He got up, not so steadily, and walked past Bog, letting him know where he was going.   
There was a staircase that led from the basement around the building and onto the rooftop. It was barely lit and he missed a step once or twice in his inebriated state, but he eventually felt the cool night air beckoning him from above.  
He had to find his way in between Saddiqi’s wife's laundry to get there, sheets and pillowcases drying in the wind, occupying half of the rooftop. They fluttered under a perfectly clear night sky, illuminated from afar by the weak neon lights out on the street. He strayed away from them, moving in the opposite direction of the rooftop, where there were no lights and he could watch the city sleep and the clear sky, filled to the brim with stars.   
  
There was no sound, just the wind. A gunshot echoed in the distance, very far away, and he tensed for a moment but it had been just one, that was all.   
The sheets were fluttering all around him and he lifted them out of his way, inhaling the fresh smell of detergent, feeling them heavy with moisture still, on the back of his hand.  
Fuck, why were there so many fucking sheets, how many beds did Saddiqi’s house have?  
He suddenly realized that the sheets seemed to be stretching for a long way ahead of him, so far in the distance he could not tell where they ended. Some of them seemed to be fluttering in the wind in quiet repetition. The same folds, the same shadows.  
His heart skipped a beat and then started to drum in his chest, adrenaline slowly pulling him out of his inebriated state, dragging him up to the surface as fast as it could, sensing danger, sensing that something was a bit off. He focused on the details.  
The edges of his vision were frazzled, as if the long stretch of sheets was fraying into a different dimension, but when he turned around to make sure, the image was steady - it only seemed to happen on the edges of his vision.  
Thor did not have any guns on him, but he did have a knife in his boot, which he extracted silently. He felt a presence in that almost surreal landscape full of white sheets and pillowcases, but he could not tell if it was behind him, next to him or all around. There was a sense of danger looming in the air, but it was different than the danger he was used to in warzones. It was bubbling right beneath the surface, calmly.  
He kept walking, turning each sheet cautiously, trying to peer under them for shadows, for legs, for movement. He finally saw one.  
  
A shift, a motion beyond one of them, where the neon lights from the other side of the street were bouncing off just enough light to catch a shadow. He braced himself, knife in his right hand, as he pulled the sheet away.   
A man was standing with his back to him. He was wearing a black suit, much too expensive to belong in the midst of Saddiqi’s laundry, and it stood out on the backdrop of Kabul's skyline like a sore thumb. His hair was black, blacker than the night itself, and it was cascading in loose waves down on his back, some of it resting on his shoulders. He didn’t even need to turn around, Thor had dropped the knife as soon as he’d seen him take his hands out of his pockets. He could pick out those hands out of a million others.  
  
Loki looked over his shoulder almost as if he had not expected Thor to reach him that quickly, almost as if he had been contemplating the myriad of fluttering sheets before him. He was Loki, but a Loki that looked composed, back straight, but shoulders relaxed.  
There were lines on his face Thor did not remember and when he turned around completely, he noticed a scar on the right side of his jaw, quite small, but permanent. The kind not even Gods heal from. His eyes were his Asgard eyes, in spite of his human clothes - they glowed in the darkness a little in an almost bioluminescent green that reminded Thor of the phosphorus on Miller’s analog watch.  
The sense of danger subsided. There was nothing but the wind and the illusion of a never ending rooftop filled with white sheets fluttering in the cool night air.  
  
And Loki smiled at him a smile Thor did not remember seeing on his face since they were but very young, and he felt a deep, heavy sigh being tugged out from where it was lodged in his throat.  
His voice was warm and it was calm:  
“ _Thor._ ”  
He was the most composed Thor had ever seen him, his eyes not wandering from one spot to another, indicating those cogs of his mind that never stopped moving, scheming, calculating and plotting. His eyes were steady now and in spite of their color, they were comforting.  



	3. Chapter 3

  


  
  
It all made sense now, the seemingly endless rows of sheets. It was all dimensions layered one on top of the other, shielding Loki from whoever might be God enough to sense his presence. It all flayed Thor’s mind like a whip. It burned on his brain, his now human mind, unable to comprehend the vastness of the many laws of the Cosmos and reality that Loki was bending.  
He used to understand it all easily even if he could not command it himself, but the details of it all were muddled in his mind. He felt like he was breathing in the midst of quicksand. But it was alright, he could take it, he could take anything thrown at him in that moment, because Loki was there, clear as day, and the rush of adrenaline had woken him up from drunkenness.  
He didn’t know what to say and he suddenly felt very small in his brother’s presence, human and smelling like cigarette smoke and cheap beer as he was.  
All he could do was say his name.  
“Loki…” came out of his mouth with a half sigh, swallowed in the depths of his chest. He held the rest in, the way he wanted to whisper his name, over and over, in many voices, filled with many sighs and longings, sounds going up and down on his tongue, like a song.  
“I would have expected you to be a bit more ecstatic.” Loki said, and the corners of his lips went up, but only just a bit, curling up into the ghost of a smile that could have been.  
He looked alert, and the emaciated look he used to have on his face was gone. In its stead, another one had made a home across his features. It was just as hollow but infinitely more composed. There was a steady strength radiating from him that Thor had never witnessed before, except in the rare moments when he’d turned to look over his shoulder and had watched Loki fight an enemy that he had complete control over.  
But never outside those fights.  
There was a straight line where he kept his shoulders, as if he was held up by more than his spine alone.  
 _I missed you so much_ , Thor wanted to say. He wanted to ask if Loki missed him too, he wanted to ask if he could touch his hair, his face, hold him for a moment.  
He couldn’t. Instead he only said:   
“I am. But I am also confused. Why are you here?”  
  
The sheets fluttered in mind-numbing repetition. The chilly night wind played with Loki’s hair for a moment too, before Loki probably willed it to stop crossing paths with him and his hair rearranged itself to fall in generous curls over his shoulders and back. His hair was the longest Thor had ever seen him have it. He could barely help himself not to reach out and touch it.  
They were just an arm’s length away.  
“Father is still asleep.” Loki said, his tone measured, his voice even “There has been a war, between us and the Jotun. They took over the Bifrost and we only had Heimdall to hold them off for us. The Warrior Three were the first line of defense and we have held them off for long enough to seal the Rainbow Bridge.”  
Thor did not want to ask, so he waited for Loki to speak, give him whatever bad news he had come down to give. Loki put his hands one into the other, in a gesture that reminded Thor of their mother so strongly he felt a pang of pain in his chest.  
Loki was about to deliver a blow, Thor could see it in the pursed way he held his lips together and the way his jaw clenched and unclenched before he spoke.  
  
“But Hofund was destroyed in battle, and there was no way to completely close the Bifrost. They came into Asgard in waves. It took all of our forces to drive them back. Mother had joined Freyja, still bound by duty to the Valkyries and they marched into Jotunheim. They-” Loki’s mouth could not follow through. His face was barely holding it together, in spite of the fact he had had the time to mourn.  
Thor could not feel his knees. His head started shaking weakly, looking down at the ground, then at the sheets around him, then back at Loki.  
“No…”  
“The Valkyries marched through the Jotun army and decimated them. Mother and Freyja single handedly killed Laufey and saved us all.”  
Thor felt emptiness around him and inside him. The dimensions around him shook, just a bit, an honest sign of Loki’s distress, but he found his focus fast enough to maintain the illusion still. There was a hand inside Thor's chest and it was squeezing in his lungs, his heart, his ribs, that’s how Thor felt it. The shame of having caused a war, the grief of his mother’s loss, all those things rushed over him like a tidal wave. He tried to keep it together, but he couldn’t quite feel his legs.  
“I thought you deserved to know.” Loki’s voice was softer now, the sound of the fluttering sheets almost covering it. “I could not reach you back then. The Bifrost was shattered upon the return of the Valkyries. It took us time to rebuild.”  
  
Thor nodded. He understood, even his small human mind could understand the vastness of the situation.  
“She is truly gone?”  
Loki’s shoulders dropped, but only a bit:  
“She is.”  
Thor squeezed his eyes shut as hard as he could, and then buried the bottom of his palms into his eyes, fingers digging into his own skin. He felt pain in his chest, a pain so immense it crushed him under its weight, and he had nothing at his disposal to deal with it, no thunder to unleash, no lightning to hammer into mountains or crash into raging seas. He had felt weak a great deal many times, but never like in that moment, when the immensity of his grief could not be sent out into the world like a monsoon, crashing and burning in its wake.  
He only had his own mind to contain it and the vessel of his human body was too small.  
His knees gave in under him and he folded over himself, fingers through his hair, holding a scream lodged in his throat because he knew that he needed more than that to even release a fraction of his rage, and also because he knew it would not mean a single thing, because the only one he could rage at was himself and he could not fathom a good enough way to punish himself.  
He saw Loki’s feet shuffle in the corner of his eye, moving closer to him and he saw him lean in, a hand outstretched towards him, hovering over his back and he wanted to tell him, _hold me Loki, for the love of everything, hold me and crush me with the shadows you wield if you want,_ he wanted to tell him: _hold me Loki, let me cry in the crook of your neck until I have nothing left in me to cry_.  
  
But Loki stepped away from him and it filled Thor with even more grief, the fact that he could still feel the warmth of his hand hovering across his back even after it was gone, ghost-like.   
Loki had adored Frigga with all his heart, in spite of how remote he seemed even in her confronts sometimes, but he truly had, and Thor had taken that away from him. He’d taken his father’s ambitions away from Loki, he had robbed Loki of both a chance and of a mother. In his wake, Thor had left nothing for Loki but the shadows of the mess he’d left behind, for his brother to deal with.  
Oh, how alike his father Thor was now!  
He took a deep breath, as deep as he could, filled his lungs with air and stopped any tears that might threatened to come out, to retreat. But he still could not get up. He didn’t feel like he had any strength left in him at all.  
“Is Asgard safe?” he managed to ask, looking up at the God before him. His tongue felt weird in his mouth and he tasted ash. He felt like he’d aged decades in just a few seconds.  
He’ll be forever changed now.  
He was looking down at the rooftop and at his own hands that laid on it, the back of his hands turned upwards, looking so dishearteningly human, tattered with swollen veins and scratches, small shrapnel scars, nails cut close to the flesh. He could not see Loki, just his feet, an arm’s length away from him.  
“Yes. Father–Verdandi had been sent a vision from Father. She-she told me he does not want you to touch Asgard again even with your memories.” Loki’s voice sounded strangled. Thor nodded.  
“Father does not need to tell me anything… My mind will never visit it. “  
Loki shifted, just a little:  
“I…I did not come here to deliver Father’s message, Thor. I came to tell you of Mother. She loved you still, in spite of everything.”   
Thor knew.  
That was what made it even worse, the knowledge that she had probably killed the Jotun King in the hopes that, by stopping the war, she could have her son back. Thor did not need anyone to tell him that.  
  
He nodded, staring at his own hands still, before he looked up at Loki, who seemed as tall as a mountain while Thor stood there on his knees in front of him, tall and infinitely beautiful in his composed manner, in his barely hidden grief. Thor did his best to keep his voice even. He did his best to compose himself too, taking his cue from Loki’s straight shoulders, from the tight clench of his jaw.  
“I know. Thank you.”  
Loki bent over Thor and Thor’s heart leapt, just for a moment, but Loki only put one hand under Thor’s arm, and gently urged him to get up. Loki’s fingers felt gentle, so gentle they were almost hard to bear on his skin. He could not remember at all, the last time Loki’s skin touched his own. He let Loki guide him back to his feet, the first time in both their lives that Loki steadied him to stand straight, and he felt, again -cursed it all be to Hel- that violent rush of love for him. It had not had died down in the slightest.  
“This is all I have for you, Thor. I just wanted you to know.” Loki said, his fingers squeezing his arm, just a little. He seemed to be searching for some words for a moment, until he found them: “ _Here a bed I have made for thee, Helgi, to rest thee from care, thou king of the Ylfings …_ ” Loki muttered and Thor offered him the weakest of smiles, and -the smallest of joys- Loki offered another in return.  
Freyja used that quote from The Poetic Edda sometimes to offer comfort to someone who was in pain, as she so often dealt with widows and orphans.  
It was her way of telling them that she was offering her arms and patience to give them solace and sanctuary, rest from their sorrows, but that was all she could possibly do. Thor did not remember how the rest of the verse went, he’d never paid attention to poetry.  
“Why the comfort of these words, Loki?”  
“I don’t have anything else to leave you with.” Loki answered, simply.  
Loki let him go, too soon, _too soon_ , his eyes darting from side to side then upwards towards the sky, turning golden for just a moment, before they returned to their normal green color. Heimdall. Something was happening in Asgard that required Loki's assistance, it seemed.  
Loki’s face regained the composure he almost lost moments before.  
“I must go.”  
The illusion was shattering, the realities cloaking Loki from view were folding backwards on themselves, mirror image into mirror image, too fast for comfort, too violent for Thor’s brain to comprehend anymore. Loki stood there in the midst of it and Thor saw a glimpse of Loki’s younger self for just a moment, a tinge of mischief shimmering in his eyes, a memory of youth long lost, as Loki offered him a half grin and said:   
“Do us both a favor and don’t die.”  
  
And then he was gone in a chaos of realities, of sheets fluttering into the wind, the shimmers of the Bifrost recalling him.  
The world returned to normal much too fast, furiously so, the chill of the night, the scent of cigarettes, the real sheets fluttering in the wind, just three rows of them this time, and the lights of Kabul shimmering through the night.  
The grief, the love, the despair, the shame, the guilt, they all hit him with the velocity of a bullet and he clenched his stomach, closed the distance between him and the ledge and vomited over the edge of the rooftop.  
Every drop of alcohol puked out of him, a taste so bitter settling in his mouth and the back of his throat he thought that was how guilt must really taste. He let it all come out between coughs and half breaths until he could only taste bile on the tip of his tongue and he dry heaved into the wind.  
Strides belonging to legs used to running in heavy boots approached and, as he leaned further into the rooftop’s ledge, he saw Kuznetsov walking towards him. He looked taken aback for a moment, a look Thor had not seen before crossing his face, but he made it go away as soon as Thor locked eyes with him and set a grin in its stead.  
“You had three beers, my friend” the Russian said said, holding out three fingers in his direction “I’m disappointed,” he said and dragged Thor up, less gently than Loki had done moments before. Had it been just moments before? Thor felt like he had been trapped in that night for many hours.  
“ _Six_ , I had six.” He muttered. His mother was gone and he had brought on destruction upon his people, in another dimension, in another life. He wanted to punch Kuznetsov in the face just to deal with what he was feeling in that moment; he wanted to be held by him too, at the same time. He still felt sick and still drunk. The feeling of being sober had disappeared alongside Loki.   
Kuznetsov frowned and squeezed his shoulder:  
“Come on Thor, I take you back to Tawfiq’s now.”   
“I’m fine.”  
“I didn’t say you’re not, but we’re leaving anyway.” The Russian said “Well, _I am_ , Lynch managed to get himself with the woman at the bar.”  
Thor gave him a snigger, but it was just for show.  
“Impressive.”  
“I _know._ In her defense, you can’t really see his face very well in that light.”

  


* * *

  
  
  
  
Bog was as dead as one can be without actually dying, snoring away in the back seat of the Jeep. The big guy occupied most of the seat, so Thor took the passenger seat, while Kuznetsov was at the wheel, strangely awake considering he had been drowning vodka all night. Thor had sprawled all over the seat, eyes closed. The post-drink lightheadedness was going to be a bitch to go to sleep with, he could feel it.  
Kuznetsov was uncharacteristically silent behind the wheel. He normally yammered on about this or that after he’d been drinking, but he had not opened his mouth since he started the car. Thor glanced in his direction for just a moment when they passed a better lit area and he saw something like concern in his eyes. He’d seen Thor drunk enough to puke all over the place before, they all had seen each other in less than decent and dignified situations, so he really didn’t know why he looked like he did.  
So Thor did what they always did when sentiment creeped in their crew's relationships: he ignored it.  
  
He was in between being sick again and falling asleep when Kuznetsov shook him awake. Bog was gone from the backseat and they were parked inside the guest house’s inner yard. He saw the turret on the other Jeep shimmering in the yellow neon light, though the familiarity didn't register for a few moments.   
“Come on, let’s go.”  
“Checkpoint?” He slurred the word.  
“No, no checkpoint, we’re back at Tawfiq. There was only one checkpoint but it was fine. Come.”  
Thor barely shifted in his seat.  
“I can’t fucking move, just let me sleep here.”  
“I can’t tell you how much I cannot do that.” Kuznetsov said, sounding almost frustrated and, for a moment, Thor could swear he had completely lost his accent, but dismissed it from his mind as a trick of his very much inebriated state. He felt himself getting pulled up and he groaned but complied, pushing himself up and out of the car.  
He could walk just fine, he thought, but he realized that was not quite right when they entered the hallway and Kuznetsov let go of him for a moment to lock all the bolts in place. Thor thought he was walking ahead but his legs carried him to the side and he bumped into the wall.  
  
Kuznetsov’s hands pulled him back. The Russian grabbed the back of his t-shirt first and then took a hold of his arm.  
“I take you to your room, come.” He pulled Thor up the stairs while Thor was yammering something about rum and how he had to wash his clothes and why the fuck did Sadiqqi’s wife had so many sheets out to dry on the rooftop. He kept talking about how his brother had been there, he loved him so much, his brother, but they couldn't talk anymore because he had fucked up, fucked up big time.  
The words came out of him in no order. Thor heard himself speaking like from a place far away. He felt his mouth moving but fuck him if he had any idea what he was saying and why.  
Kuznetsov unlocked the door to Thor’s room and pushed it open with his foot, closing it with his heel, turning the key just fast enough for Thor not to stumble off and away from him.   
He unceremoniously dropped him on the bed, much like a sack of potatoes and Thor laughed thinking about that comparison. The Russian didn’t ask.  
Thor was somewhere in between sleep and imagination, Valkyries danced in memory and he pushed them away, remembering Odin’s orders – he would not even _think_ of Asgard anymore.   
He heard a shift in the room and half opened his eyes, eyelids heavy, just to see Kuznetsov by the window, arms crossed, a frown on his face, watching the inner yard intently, physically present but thoughts far away.  
Thor thought he had been long gone by then.  
He turned his head to him when he heard the sheets rustle and Thor suppressed a sigh because, in the way the shadows fell over his face, hollowing out his cheeks, darkening his hair, he looked _so much_ like Loki.  
  
His hand beckoned Kuznetsov, a gesture he did almost involuntarily and, after some hesitation, the Russian walked over to his bed. Kuznetsov hovered over him for a moment, unfolded his arms. Thor saw how he had curled his hands into fists by his sides, curling and uncurling; he looked nervous in a way Thor had never seen him before.  
His shoulders looked tense and the shadows fell so thick over his face now that he was away from the window that, through eyelashes heavy with sleep and alcohol, Thor could only see Loki’s face in his stead, in spite of the short hair, in spite of the square jawline, in spite of thicker wrists and scarred fingers.  
He sat down on the edge of the bed, his normally straight back slouching. The shadows kept playing across his profile, giving him for a moment, his brother’s straight nose, the nose that gave Loki’s profile an arrogant air that Thor loved so much in such a selfish way. Thor pulled himself up in a sitting position, resting on his elbow and the room started spinning.  
He pinched the bridge of his nose under Kuznetsov’s attentive glance, and when that came to nothing, he looked up at him to steady the room instead. Thor had a question on his tongue, what was it... yes, he wanted to ask him why he was still in his room and why did he look like he did, but his mind would not settle.  
He had so much grief to work through and he did not want to deal with any of it in that moment.  
He wanted to drink more, to fight someone, to fuck.  
All the drinks were downstairs in the lounge.  
“I ne-“ he swallowed, his throat dry “need another drink.” He tried to move and get off the bed, but Kuznetsov’s hand stopped him dead in his tracks, pressing on his chest.  
“Enough drink for tonight.”  
Thor frowned, anger rising in his chest.  
“You’re giving me orders now?”  
“I don’t give you anything, but you don’t feel well.”  
“Fuck off out of my room and out of my life, Makar, I’ll do whatever the fuck I feel like doing!” he raised his voice. He never used the Russian’s given name unless he was really pissed at him and that had only happened a couple of times.  
  
They never argued seriously, just bickered as men who spend a lot of time together do. But tonight he was dancing on a knife's edge and he didn’t know for how long he would be able to balance himself on it before he fell down to his death.  
Kuznetsov pressed harder on his chest and pushed in his entire weight onto Thor, who fell back on the bed, taken by surprise by the sudden show of force. Kuznetsov’s arm pressed onto Thor’s chest, and the man leaned in with all his weight, shifting his position as to have one knee on the bed, the other on the floor. The proximity alone was enough to knock the fight out of Thor, alongside the short-lived nausea he got from the sudden movements. Kuznetsov was just inches away from his face and he was not moving.  
You didn’t need to read too much in the closeness. Perhaps Kuznetsov was drunk as well, just not showing it. Now that he thought about it, Thor had never seen him drunk.  
He smelled the vodka on his breath, that’s how close he was. His eyes had the same shape as Loki’s.  
 _You’ll destroy everything you have and everything you have is fragile enough as it is_ , Thor thought, but the decision was not his own to make because it was Kuznetsov who leaned in closer and pressed his lips against Thor’s.  
Yes, yes.  
No, no.  
Thor could not decide.  
He shut off his mind completely.  
  
His hand found the back of the other man’s head and he took a hold of his hair, pushing into the kiss. The kiss was incredibly messy, chapped lips, dried out by the desert wind, collapsed over his own and there was torture and delight in the way Kuznetsov shifted without breaking the kiss and got on top of him.  
He was not fucking around, his Russian, his hips were working on Thor as much as his lips were, and Thor felt his erection push into his own and he could not stifle a moan.  
 _Fine, Makar, make me feel something, make me forget all this shit_ , he thought as he grabbed his ass and pushed him harder into his own hips. They both moaned into each other’s mouths. _Let’s destroy this friendship too, since I fucking destroyed everything else._  
There was a certain despair in the way he was being kissed, or maybe he was just imagining it. At the end of the day, he was desperate too, for a gentle touch, for comfort.   
Hope had no place here, hope would be dead and buried under the Afghan sands.  
Kuznetsov offered him a small smile, Thor felt it on his lips and it gave him the comfort of believing Kuznetsov had been thinking about him the same way Thor had. He would never know the reason Thor felt that way because Kuznetsov was the best replacement for a Loki lookalike he'd met so far. It was fucked-up, it was wrong and he was a bastard for doing this. But everything had gone to hell anyway so why would anything matter anymore?  
The Russian broke the kiss, hands on Thor's chest, pushing him away. His breath was erratic and he had a guilty look on his face and at the same time he seemed angry, at Thor and at himself.   
"I'm-" Kuznetsov shook his head "Go to sleep. I'm sorry." He said, moving away. 

He only hesitated for a moment, on the edge of the bed, which gave Thor all the time he needed to get back up and grab Kuznetsov by the arm with his other hand. He held him tight, painfully so.  
He wanted to ask _why_ and _what was the deal_ , but he realized he could not handle any explanations that night, a night that had seemed to stretch on and on, crawling through the hours at a snail’s pace. He didn't even feel like continuing, like having sex. He just wanted to hold someone and be held.   
He looked through the words in his mind, and they came out like sandpaper on his tongue:  
“I want you to stay.”  
Kuznetsov blinked rapidly, in quiet succession, pondering on the demand, frowning. Thor wanted to know what was going on through his mind, if this had been just a mistake because Kuznetsov too, had been drunk and horny. He saw his fists clench and unclench, eyes undecided, body tense as if he was already halfway out the door. Thor squeezed his arm, just a little, his eyes not leaving the other man's face.   
"Nothing else, if you don't want it. I would like for someone to be in this bed with me tonight, that's all." Thor almost pleaded and he felt like a lesser man for it, but he didn't have any defenses up that night, so he'll deal with the shame of his sorrow in the morning.   
  
Kuznetsov clenched his jaw and, after a few long, silent moments, he nodded without answering and sat back on the bed, taking off his boots. Then he crawled over Thor and on the other side of the bed, setting himself a head taller than Thor, his back on the pillows.  
Thor put an arm over his eyes, shutting the world away. He was about to drift off, visions of gold and green eyes passing through his mind, when he felt Kuznetsov’s fingers through his hair, going past his forehead right in the middle, and then collapsing downwards, then starting all over again.  
It was soothing.  
Thor pulled his arm away, looked up at him and Kuznetsov offered him a weak smile. His arm pulled Thor in and, much to his own surprise, he leaned in, inching closer and closer until his head rested on Kuznetsov’s shoulder and his fingers played through Thor's hair more freely.  
“Thank you” was all Thor could mutter. He didn’t even know what he was thanking him for – the comfort he was bringing him with a simple caress or just the fact that he'd stayed?  
“You had a bad night.” Came the reply, so self-assured, so definitive, as if Kuznetsov knew.   
He flickered his eyes, opening and closing them as Kuznetsov’s fingers slowly dragged him towards sleep. The Russian’s free hand was resting lazily over his stomach and for a moment, just before Thor got pulled into the comfortable embrace of sleep, it looked exactly like Loki’s delicate, alabaster hand.  
  


* * *

  
  
  
They did not talk about it.Thor did not ask and Kuznetsov did not grace him with any answers.  
Kuznetsov had left his room that morning and acted the entire day like nothing had happened. Thor kept glancing in his direction to no avail. His entire attitude seemed to shift almost as if he was not even the same person he’d been the night before.  
However, he found himself in Thor's room again the next evening andThor had nuzzled kisses on his neck until Bog hammered at the door.  
Kuznetsov later on slithered into Thor’s room unannounced as Thor was almost falling asleep and, with the distant sounds of gunshots of the Kabul night time, Kuznetsov kissed him and distracted him with his mouth enough for him to fall asleep and not think about anything at all. There never was anything more or anything less than that because there was always a look of guilt on Kuznetsov's face every time they broke apart but Thor was willing to take anything he was given at that point.   
Any touch was better than no touch.

* * *

  
  
  
Thor eventually asked Tawfiq if there were any good barbers around and Tawfiq, who seemed to always have something up his sleeve, opened up a drawer equipped with a shaving kit and a pair of scissors and a comb. Explained why Tawfiq’s beard was the envy of their crew.  
Tawfiq took his time trimming Thor’s beard, cutting it close to his skin, giving it a proper shape and when he finally turned his attention to his hair, Thor just told him in Dari:   
“Cut it all off.”  
Tawfiq complied and rammed his scissors through it.  
Thor watched it all fall on his boots in piles. Before, when he was a God, he would have never allowed anyone to cut his hair, save for the palace barber, who had been doing it for generations. Only scissors made of gold and combs sculpted in ivory had touched his hair back then. But he was not that God anymore and there was no point in hanging on to that illusion.  
He had brought ruin and destruction upon his people.  
He did not deserve one single goddamn thing.  
  
Kuznetsov sat at the wooden table in the lounge while Tawfiq was hacking away. His feet were set on the table and he was smoking. He was exhaling the smoke with a laziness akin to sultriness and his eyes did not leave Thor for a moment as piles of cigarettes gathered in the ashtray before him. Thor liked to watch him smoke, how his lips curled around the cigarettes and how lazily his fingers held on to them, almost, just almost, gracefully.  
Thor did not fuck him, he wanted to, but he didn't, not yet; it was Kuznetsov who came to him and gave him his mouth willingly and Thor did not ask any questions. He just took whatever he was given.  
For the time being, it was enough. His mind was not thinking too much, and every time he seemed to ponder more deeply on anything, Kuznetsov was right around the corner with trouble on his mind.  
His hands slicked with motor oil and dirt darker by the day, as he seemed to never stop doing things and dragging Thor along. _Hold the car battery Thor_ , he'd say, _pass me the wrench_ , he'd ask, t _ry out this rum, bet you twenty dollars you can't finish more than four glasses_. Thor let him and he fell into Kuznetsov’s rhythm, grateful for the distraction.  
Grateful for the comfort.  
  


* * *

  
  
  
When their new contract arrived, two weeks later, they geared up within the hour and said their goodbyes to Tawfiq.  
They were supposed to rendezvous with a military convoy and accompany them to Kuh-e Soltan Saheb, some 90 clicks away, to offer support for a diplomatic meeting between a village leader and the U.S Military.  
They figured they had information to give them about enemy troops hiding in the mountains and that they’d get it in exchange for protection. It was a bullshit mission because everyone knew someone in the village was about to get hurt as soon as they left, protection or not. They’d probably been threatened many times before not to leak anything, had their wives and children threatened, their entire livelihood.  
It was all bullshit. But the military still went through the motions.  
  


* * *

  
  
Thor wrapped his shemagh around his neck after he’d used it to wipe some sweat from his face. He then tightened the tac vest, pulling his sunglasses on. His rifle rested between Kuznetsov’s legs this time, as Thor was the one driving.  
The soldiers had joined their little convoy, adding three more armored cars to the line, somewhere around the Mohammad Agha district. From then on, they turned left and followed roads barely marked. They let the soldiers take lead as they followed in the middle, with Sajak and Lynch and Miller up front, and Bog and Pavel behind them, since they had the turret.  
“The heat is bullshit today.” Lynch’s voice crept from the PTT.  
“You seem alright” Thor spoke back, leaning into his microphone and driving with one hand “I can see you guys yammering incessantly in the car.”  
“We were talking about what we’re gonna do when we go back home next month. Nothing much to do for us, really.” Lynch answered, looking at Thor with a grin in the rear view mirror. Thor had forgotten - their contract ended next month, they were free to return home until they wanted another job.  
Thor was undecided if he was going to stay in Afghanistan still, return to Iraq, or take another job in Beirut, like it had been suggested to him weeks ago from Blackpool HQ. He wondered if  
Kuznetsov would come with him if he asked.  
“What’s so bad about going home?” he mocked.  
“I’d love to go home, don’t get me wrong, but what would I do there? I don’t think there’s a war in Minnesota.” Lynch said and Miller’s hearty laugh filled the gaps in the static. Thor grinned. They were not unlike him, these humans he had shared his life with for the past year – functioning in a world that did not offer them conflict did not really speak to them. They stumbled through the motions of daily life without direction, unless there were right out there, in the shit.  
That was the conversation they were having that incredibly hot day.  
  
They were just half an hour away from the village, crossing a plantation, when the shooting started.  
And here they were now, over twenty minutes later, crouched under the cars and behind them, trying to pinpoint where the bullets were coming from. The wild grass was too tall and they couldn’t see anything.  
That was not even the worst part, the worst part was that there was grass on both sides and they did not know how long it would be before the bullets would start hailing from the other side as well.  
“Give me something, man!” Thor yelled in the PTT, addressing the unit’s Commander.   
“Back up is coming. Advance through cover fire!” He yelled and one of the armored cars drove in reverse, covering a stretch of road between two other cars, offering the semblance of a shelter. The driver crawled out from the driver’s seat and slithered onto the road, holding as close to the ground as he could.  
Of course the contractors were the one asked to advance, the man was first and foremost concerned with keeping his soldiers alive.  
Thor groaned and set the helmet on his head. Kuznetsov was next to him, both of them glued to the side of the car, a question in his eyes.  
“He want us to go in the fucking grass?” He asked.  
“I think that’s the course of action he has in mind.”  
“I call that shitty course of action.”  
“Tell me about it.”  
“If I could get on the turret, I could have a better line of sight.”  
“I give you three seconds before you get shot through the head.”  
Kuznetsov looked over the Jeep for a second:  
“They have bad aim, fifty bucks I can make it.” He had that dumb look in his eyes he got when he was about to do something stupid, but Thor didn’t realize it until it was too late. He just rolled his eyes at him and turned his back on the car instead, watching the grass behind them, trying to devise a better plan.  
“Hey, while I'm gone,” Kuznetsov said “don’t die.” He winked.  
  
Before Thor could even say something, Kuznetsov had jumped up and was making a straight line down the road, jumping to cover from car to car. Thor watched him, swift and agile, his boots sliding across the dirt of the road, rising up the dust in their wake. Kuznetsov was 75 kilograms of swiftness and unadulterated, absolute stupidity. Thor yelled after him and he didn’t even know what he expected to achieve with that. Kuznetsov was aiming for the turret on their Jeep, he knew how to use that one.  
“Dumbass motherfucker!” Thor clenched his teeth and, without weighing his options, he jumped up and aimed in the general direction of the grass where shots in Kuznetsov’s direction were coming. He slipped next to Pavel who was yelling at him as well, pulling at his tac vest, most likely trying to stop him from getting up on the Jeep. Sajak was yelling behind Pavel as well, pointing a finger at Kuznetsov.  
The fucker actually planned to go directly up on the turret, what kind of an idiotic decision was that?  
Thor put one foot out to jump to the shelter of the next car where Lynch and Miller were, when shots started to hail from the other side of the grass. Lynch offered him cover fire and Miller was reloading.  
Miller’s head hit the car door and his body convulsed, blood splattering the metal and he slumped to the side. Lynch immediately followed. Thor turned around himself in one swift motion and ran towards the nearest military armored car but his run was cut down by a row of bullets exploding right in front of him.  
No choice. He ran backwards and took a hold of Miller’s lifeless body and put it between himself and the bullets, hiding half beneath the Jeep. He felt the bullets penetrate the tac vest, the flesh and he made himself as small as he could to fit Miller’s body shape. 

Miller got shot through the neck and blood started to spill all over Thor’s hand, which was clasping at the collar of his dead teammate. He could not stay there, he had to hide. Judging by the erratic shots, he figured the enemy did not have a clean line of sight anyway.  
He immediately fell to the ground, Miller’s body over him, blood spilling down Thor’s clothes, getting on his face and into his mouth and he rolled into the ditch. He pulled Miller’s body along with him, and the enemy got the impression he had wanted to give them: that a dead body had just rolled down. No shots followed the direction of his fall but he still waited, Miller’s warm blood soaking his neck and collar.  
He slithered from under him slowly, crawling through the ditch, through the dirt, the animal shit and the iron-like smell of Miller’s blood. He only realized he’d dropped his rifle next to the car when he noticed he was not holding anything in his left hand. He reached for his pistol instead and pulled his helmet backwards just a little, staring up at the tall grass, then down, trying to peer through it.  
He thought he could see some muzzle flashes in their midst but couldn’t be sure. Teeth clenched, he slithered through it, as slow as he could, trying not to disturb the movement of the grass too much and he was thankful for the dreadfully hot wind blowing through them.  
He felt sweat in his eyes and on his lips but let it drip anyway, his senses on full alert. The grass was taller than he was, thick and peppered with bushes of what looked like poisonous berries and navigating through it was not easy. There was a tree in the midst of it. If he reached it, he could have some shelter.  
He advanced slowly, his fingers pressing the gun so hard his knuckles turned white. He willed them to calm down, to relax, as he tried to regulate his breathing. He needed to be rock, to be mountain. To be everywhere.  
He inched closer to the tree as bullets flew all around above him. Dirt encrusted itself all over him, clinging to the drying blood.Thor reached the tree, pushing his body so closely to its roots he felt them hurt his ribs. Deep breaths, _one-two, one-two._ He lifted his head just a bit, taking advantage of the lower branches and he pulled up the shemagh around his mouth, as its color was very similar to that of the tree. He saw them now, lined up in the grass. Just three of them but you couldn’t have said that, judging by the heavy fire, which had probably been their intention.   
He aimed his gun and almost prayed but he realized there was no one to pray _to_. His brain was high on adrenaline.   
  
He saw himself die there, beneath that tree and he was fine with it. It was not Yggdrasil, but it would do, considering.  
Death was fine.  
He hoped it was going to hurt.  
He aimed and took the shot. The pistol blocked.  
At the same time that happened, he noticed movement to his right side, right next to the tree and when he looked, all these actions within one second, there _ **he** _was.  
He looked out of place, and he looked like himself but not like himself - his brother, massive and heavy under the weight of the tactical gear. His hair was short, much lighter in color. His eyes were impossibly green.  
“ ** _Move_**!” he commanded, grabbing the back of Thor’s tac vest, pushing him down and within a fraction of a second, Thor watched him from down in the dirt where he was, taking aim and shooting three shots in quick succession, the rolled up sleeves of his camouflage uniform showing the muscles in his forearms tense with the effort of the recoil.  
As soon as he finished, he took cover and bent over Thor, this Loki unlike Loki, anger flashing in his eyes, venomous accusation in his voice:  
“ **I told you not to die**!”

  
The grass stung his nostrils and he could smell everything at once, his own sweat, the dry earth, the animal shit, Miller’s blood, caked along with dirt on his hands and face.  
Loki was looking down at him frowning in a manner that contorted his face in a way Thor did not recognize because that was not his frown, it was something he was creating an illusion out of. Loki’s jaw was clenched tightly on his words, unlike when he had been angry at Thor before and his words still seemed to be hanging loosely in his jowls.  
  
Why was Loki wearing Kuznetsov’s necklace? He could see the silver chain around his neck, the cross pendant his mother had given him before he left Novgorod tucked beneath his shirt and tac vest. Thor’s eyes wandered across him, across his straight shoulders, over the black G-Shock watch on his right wrist. Loki was right handed. Kuznetsov was not. Why was Loki wearing Kuznetsov’s clothes? Why was he holding his gun? Why did his hair look exactly the same as Makar’s?  
He felt his blood boil and Loki saw it in his eyes, for his own green eyes shifted across Thor’s face rapidly and he looked at his hands that were resting on the rifle and indeed, they were Loki’s hands, Loki’s smooth, almost marble-like hands, and not Kuznetsov’s thick wrists with darkened knuckles.   
Loki too, realized his illusion had crumbled.  
  
Thor’s reaction was completely instinctive. He did not even think for a second, he just followed through with an energy and strength he did not even know he still possessed, grabbing Loki’s (Kuznetsov’s) rifle, pulling him in and then taking a hold of his tac vest, closing in the distance. He punched him down to the ground. Loki was taken completely by surprise and his shoulder hit the tree as he stumbled down.  
Reinforcements were hailing bullets behind them in the grass but Thor didn’t care, he could barely hear them, he could barely focus on the fact he was in Afghanistan, on Earth, on the fact he was not a God anymore because what he felt inside, rage and fury and shame and guilt and all the other things he didn’t have any adjectives for, felt powerful enough to raise one last lightning out of him.  
As soon as Loki’s back hit the ground, Thor kicked the rifle away from him, kneeling down over him and he punched him again, blood exploding from his nose and splattering across his right cheek.  
Loki trashed beneath him but Thor did not let him slither away. His brother covered his face to block the hits and Thor pried them away a moment before Loki yelled “ ** _Enough!_** ” and Thor flew off him, wrapped in dark shadows, rolling in the grass, face in the dirt.  
He was panting hard from the blow, it had knocked the air out of his lungs and he raged at his mortal weakness as he lolled from one side to the other, raising himself up halfway with the help of one arm, his eyes on Loki, Loki’s eyes on him. Or eye, more likely. His left eye was already swelling, red all around, his cheek turning a deep shade of red that announced a purple one to follow. His nose was still bleeding, staining his tac vest.   
Thor let out a scream, raw and visceral, that seemed to have brught a new kind of terror in Loki’s eyes as he stared at him breathing heavily, the back of his hand under his nose. His blood was staining the roots of the tree. Thor’s fingers clenched in the dirt:   
“ _ **What have you done?**_ ”  
  
  
“Thor! Makar!” Pavel’s voice broke through. It was followed by Sajak’s a second after:  
“Are you alive?”  
The grass was moving but you couldn’t tell from which direction the sound was coming. Thor was suddenly aware of the sound of a helicopter above the area. He was suddenly aware of the breeze in the wind, hot and dry, of the sweat dripping down his temples, down the tip of his nose and into his mouth. The smell of blood. The knuckles on his right hand, their skin pried open. Both his blood and Loki’s mixing into the gash of the middle finger knuckle.  
Loki looked up at the grass, its movement, and put his head down, running a hand from his chin way into his hair and when he moved it away, Kuznetsov’s face was staring at him, blue eyes alert, guilty. The illusion faltered on the edges of his face, a swell forming, a drip of blood on his upper lip. He let it be, and Kuznetsov’s face sported the same swollen eye and bloody nose as Loki’s.  
  
Before Thor could open his mouth, Pavel reached them, first his rifle, and then the rest of his body.  
“I found them, they’re over here!” he yelled, perhaps towards Sajak, perhaps towards no one in particular. It was Bog who showed up instead, his massive frame towering over Thor as he leaned in and pulled him up.  
“What the shit happened to you?” He asked, looking at Kuznetsov, (looking at Loki) while his strong arm was steadying Thor.  
Kuznetsov (Loki, Loki) gave him a non-committal shrug and a dismissive wave of his hand and took Pavel’s hand, who helped him up. As he leaned down to recover his rifle, his posture was strong and just a little slouched, in the same way it had always been, and he put his rifle back on with the same uselessly wide motions Kuznetsov always had. Nothing, absolutely nothing in his character, in his minute movements, could ever point at the fact the man in front of Thor was not the Russian they all knew since Colombia, since almost two years before; the Russian from Novgorod whose mother’s name was Olga, who described to them in great detail the streets of his childhood and the beaches there, who spoke to his father in Russian on the phone once a week. Nothing.  
“Miller's gone.” Bog said, looking at Thor “I don’t know how we’re gonna transport him back until the bleeding stops.”


	4. Chapter 4

With the mission aborted, they were driving back to Kabul in the same convoy, crossing the highway with backup cars flanking them as the sunset burned their faces. Bog had taken over Miller and Lynch’s Jeep, driving ahead while Sajak and Pavel were riding behind. Pavel was still on the turret, red faced and alert, with Lynch and Miller’s bodies on each side of him, bleeding their way into the sand that coated the floor of the Jeep. The military had offered them body bags. Their crew had not prepared for that. They had imagined themselves to be invincible by that point and Thor's constant survival in spite of having the odds stacked against him over and over again just re-assured them they'd be fine.

* * *

  


Back at Tawfiq’s, one of them call HQ to tell them they had to bring someone in to deal with the bodies. And eventually, the bravest of them all, in one day or a year, would call Miller’s wife or Lynch’s mother and tell them only the best things about the men they’d loved.  
  
The convoy in itself seemed terrifyingly silent. No soldier had died, some had been hurt, only Miller and Lynch were lost. Lynch had been clean shot through the eye while Miller took a bullet through the chest. They’d all send money to contribute for their funerals and for any other support their families might need. Neither of them was sure they'd attend the funerals however.   
Thor held his rifle between his legs while driving, sunglasses on, reflecting the road and the red sun. Next to him, Kuznetsov _(Loki, Loki, Loki)_ was leaning into the open window. His eye had darkened to a deep purple shade but the swelling had receded. One of the military medics had cut under his brow, to release the blood. He was still holding on to a piece of gauze, just in case the cut bled again. His upper lip was only mildly swollen. Everyone had seen his battered face, so he could not hide it anymore, he had to play along.  
He’d gotten in the car after Thor did and Thor completely ignored him. He could not say anything, do anything for the time being, while they were still under everyone else’s eyes.  
  
Ahead, one of the soldiers puked out the window of a Humvee. He had a bandage around his face and the guy Thor had pinned as the medic pulled him back inside with a less than gentle tug. Thor only saw his hand but he’d recognized the bracelet he was wearing.  
The PTT chatter was slow.  
  
“ _Where’s Captain America **now?** How come he's never in the shit with us?_” someone spoke in the midst of a short exchange of replies Thor had not been paying attention to.  
“ _Getting spy pussy and having a good time in his high tower._ ” Someone else replied but nobody laughed. It was barely malicious in tone, just tired.  
“ _How about we get to have that shield for a bit while he gets the pussy, huh? That thing could have kept the bullets away from my fucking eye_.”  
“ _It’s a graze Hudson, you’ll live. Stop cluttering the radio with your bullshit_.”   
“ _Yes, sir._ ”  
  
It was mostly silent after that exchange.  
  
Kuz- No. _Loki._  
Loki searched one of the pockets of his tac vest and took out a crumpled pack of cigarettes. He tentatively stretched out one towards Thor and held it in the air for a long time, without any response. He took it back and pressed it between his lips, lighting it up. Thor listened to him inhale deeply and then exhale even deeper, most of it a sigh. Loki turned those blue eyes that were not his own towards Thor, the cigarette burning itself between his dirt and blood-stained fingers.   
“Thor.”  
“ **Shut the fuck up** , Loki. I don’t want to hear your fucking voice. I don’t even want to hear you breathe. **Shut up**. Just keep your fucking mouth shut, you fucking piece of shit. _**Shut up!**_ ” Thor cut through whatever words Loki was about to say.  
And for once in his life, Loki kept silent.  
  


* * *

  
  
  
It seemed to drag on forever. The night was stifling and the military base even more so. Thor had to stomach a debrief he didn’t give two shits about but had to go through with because he was bound by contract to do so. Then, to keep going, he drank cupfuls of filter coffee that tasted like camel piss and called HQ to ask them to collect Miller and Lynch’s bodies. The military agreed to keep them until Blackpool would sort it out and Thor was grateful because he did not know how many decisions he could be trusted with that day.   
All that he’d done under the watchful eye of Loki, but thankfully, under his silent mouth as well. He saw him interact with Bog, hand over a cigarette to Sajak in the mock waiting area the base had settled, and he was never, not for a moment, Loki. Not even when he looked in his direction. He was Kuznetsov through and through.  
Thor was waiting for a call back from HQ before they could leave, so he turned his back from his crew and walked outside through the opposite door, where they were loading containers. He sneaked around a truck and followed through towards the edge of base camp.  
It was nearing midnight and the skies were star lit and clear. He stepped out of the neon light and watched the vast expanse of the darkness before he lit himself a cigarette. He inhaled it so deep as if it were oxygen.  
  
_Two years._  
Two years Loki had been with him, unless he had done something to a real Kuznetsov and took his place without Thor realizing it. But no, now that he thought about it, ever since he’d met Kuznetsov, things did not add up with him. Small things, like how he seemed to be able to do things very well with his right hand too, how he never Skyped with his family, only spoke on the phone with them. How sometimes his eyes looked much too green to be just a trick of light. How he somehow always came around having, discussing whatever it was Thor liked. He’d thought it was strange they got along so well, so fast, but he blamed it on just one of those things that sometimes happen with others.  
Two years Loki had stalked in his wake through Colombia and Afghanistan.  
  
That night when Thor took a Colombian brunette with him in his room and came out just in time to stop him from snorting cocaine.  
That day when they both sat down under a bridge, watching the shadow of a man with a Colombian necktie loll in the wind above them and all they did was exchange the same cigarette between the two of them, with that morbid scene as a backdrop.  
Kuznetsov getting drinks during their layover for Afghanistan and climbing the fence of the hotel they were staying at, singing a Russian folk song, arms wide open towards the full moon. He almost fell over in the pool.  
Kuznetsov who stood at the window of his room just two weeks before and then walked to him, hands clenching and unclenching, shoulders tense, nervous; who leaned in and kissed him hungrily, with intent and purpose.   
  
Thor groaned into the night air and pinched the bridge of his nose, dug his fingers in so deep he might as well have poked his eyes out. He didn’t understand. He could not rejoice.  
The greatest love of his life had leaned in over him one night, with a face that was not his own, and kissed him and held him and returned to him under the same guise, and Thor could not feel a god damn thing except for anger.  
He wanted to kill him, revive him and kill him again.  
He didn’t understand.  
He felt like screaming. He felt like crying. But neither emotions were coming out. He felt himself turn into stone, bit by bit, he felt his body grow colder, he willed his heart to slow down. Everything had changed in ways he could not even imagine, and he did not possess the power to hold it all together between his fingers and he felt it, he felt it like a chord vibrating from one end of the Cosmos to the other, the immensity of the situation and how small his arms were, too small to contain it.  
“You will make yourself sick with thinking.”  
The world shifted.  
Reality upon reality fell upon him, around him, layers and layers of it, he _felt it_ , but when Thor turned towards the voice he could not see the military base anymore.  
  
He was in the middle of the desert, standing on a dune. In the distance, he could guess the shapes of mountains and some clouds. A round, full moon illuminated the dunes as they stretched into the horizon. The sky had an eerie quality to it, patches of barely visible nebulae erupting in between the calm shimmers of the stars. A faint aurora caressed the tips of the distant mountains and extended out into nothingness on the horizon.  
There was a breeze blowing, ever so faint, and there was no sound, just the wind twisting the sand around his ankles. It was incredibly peaceful, and Thor swallowed his surprise in a second. Hand in his pocket, he brought the cigarette to his mouth and looked up at the colors, how they dripped onto the sky like veils of silk. Loki could have created many spaces for both of them. He could have created the lake they swam in at night as kids. Planets they visited, places of constant light or perpetual darkness. But he knew that Thor’s mind would not be able to assimilate them like he used to anymore, so he’d chosen a place Thor had become too well acquainted with – the desert, and decorated it with the closest things he could find in the human world that would have maybe, resembled the Bifrost passage, or the Rainbow Bridge.  
Things that would keep Thor calm. Thor could not say how he was so sure of all this, but he knew his brother, whether either of them liked it or not.  
  
As expected, Loki allowed him to have a good look around before he appeared, walking up towards him from behind a dune. A nebulae was framing him like a halo. He was still wearing his Kuznetsov clothes, but his hair was his own this time, long, dark and swaying gently over his shoulders in the breeze. He kept his hands in his pockets as he advanced, his boots pressing deep into the sand. The tactical attire did not suit him at all.  
He walked up to Thor and stood next to him, an arm’s length away and watched the aurora shift and shimmer in perfect silence for a while, with only Thor’s nicotine exhales for company.  
“I believe we must talk.” He said, not tearing his eyes away from the aurora. Thor took a deep drag and turned away from him, looking at the nebulae. They were now side by side, though each facing the opposite direction, shoulder to shoulder, with their eyes on different things. How telling it was, of how their paths had diverged.  
Thor did not say anything, in spite of the fact Loki had given him a generous pause to think.  
“Very well.” Loki started, his voice low but his words precise. “Where should I begin….”  
“How about you decide when to finish?” Thor offered, not even giving him a glance over his shoulder.   
Loki ignored him.  
  
“Asgard was plunged in chaos as they raised me, ever so reluctantly, to the throne. There was no ceremony, there was no feast, no joy, no merriment. Quite fitting, you see, for a man such as I, I suppose. Why did I expect all those simpletons to give me even an ounce of respect until I bled myself dry for them, I do not know. So there I stood, on my throne. And they were all watching me and they were all awaiting for me to lead them in battle. I could see it in their eyes, the hope that maybe, _just maybe_ , either the rightful heir to the throne would thunder down from the Bifrost with his mighty hammer, or perhaps the poor wretch sitting on the throne would arise mightily in the midst of battle, to show them power just as great as the first born.”   
Loki kicked the sand with his foot and it danced in waves around his feet before he continued: “I raged brother. I _raged_ in battle, I swung my horns up and down and impaled frost giants upon them and carried the Valkyries into Jotunheim on waves of dark magic, shielding them from prying eyes by making them to be millions, illusion upon illusion, and I unleashed such furies with them by my side that our people watched in horror. But you don’t win battles with sheer force, no matter what Father and you have taught the people of Asgard to believe.” Loki gave Thor a short glance over both their shoulders, but it only registered as a delicate movement of his hair.  
  
“Heimdall opened his many eyes for me in millions of places and I saw it all at once, as things happened. I felt my eyes burn in my skull but I did not yield, and I watched hundreds of souls fight and scream and fuck at the same time in the midst of war. I saw Jotuns in Aflheim, in Vanaheim, Nifelheim, they were even trying to invade Svartalfheim. Do you know the effort of will it takes to see many things at once, and to create a different illusion of each and every one of them?” He paused, as if Thor would answer “No, of course you don’t. It is immense, in a way I cannot quantify to your mortal brain. Perhaps not even to your Asgardian one, you were never one for deep thought.”  
Thor snorted. It was half amused, half annoyed. But still, he did not talk.   
“I unleashed billions upon them. I transported my illusions into every realm, with Heimdall by my side, his hand over my eyes, and with them, the few warriors we had. I transported lifelines of my own magic that I charged those illusions with and though their damage was minimal, as my magic was stretching thin, it was enough to chase the Jotun out of the realms and we, I, pushed them to The Well of Urd where mother and Freyja were waiting with their Valkyries and it was there that we exerted the final battle. They mourned our mother greatly, but I could still hear their whispers, calling, calling for Odin, calling that he wakes to see his Queen depart. But Father didn’t, so they were stuck with me. They still did not like me, you see. My magic frightened them, it _still_ does. It frightens them that I walk in the shadows and it frightens them that I do not offer them consolation for their losses. Why should I? They never wanted me, and in spite of having brought the Jotuns upon them, they would still rather have _you_ on the throne.”  
  
Thor took a deep breath. Released it. Stayed quiet. Loki watched him this time very well, speaking over his shoulder. He was almost close enough for Thor to feel the heat of his body, their shoulders barely an inch away.  
“Being the King of this lot… it bores me immensely, Thor.” Loki said, his voice almost a slither “Don’t misunderstand me, I will continue to be King.”  
Thor’s cigarette lit up his face for a moment, before he turned to look over his shoulder at Loki, their faces too close for comfort, but he held his glance regardless:  
“Of course you will.”  
 _What_ _of_ Asgard? _What of_ being King? What did that mean to Thor anymore? Just faded memories of a place his human mind could barely comprehend.   
They held each other’s gaze for what seemed like a long time. Perhaps it was, green eyes melting into blue ones and vice versa, their breaths melting into each other’s the same way the aurora changed its colors, a shimmer breathing life into another.  
  
“It’s not Asgard I want to know of, it does not belong to me anymore.” Thor said, not breaking his gaze. Loki’s eyes were searching in his own, Thor could see the cogs of his mind twisting and turning and just for a moment, he saw Loki as he was a long time ago, before they entered Jotunheim at all; a Loki of shadows and questions, terrified of what lurked within his own mind.  
“You want to know of something that belongs to you, then?”  
Thor was getting frustrated. He felt his anger start boiling back up in his chest and he dropped the cigarette in the sand. His hand reached around Loki and he grabbed a fistful of the jacket Loki was wearing, the one Kuznetsov was always wearing, and he jerked Loki once, hard. He spoke between grit teeth:   
“This body belonged to me. Two weeks ago. And I want to know why!”  
Loki’s face registered surprise for a second too short for Thor to be sure, before a wide grin spread across his face:  
“I felt pity for you.”  
Thor’s arm raised before his mind even reacted, but Loki was ready this time, and the entire desert shattered. It was not an earthquake, it was something much deeper than that, on a more visceral level, a fracture in the fabric of reality, barely a thread and completely manageable but which burned the edges of Thor’s vision and made him sick to his stomach. He stepped back, dry heaving. It stopped as soon as he let go of Loki.  
His brother's voice traveled to his ears commanding:  
“Not in here, Thor. This is **_my_** domain.”  
  
And Thor laughed.  
He laughed at the absurdity of life in its entirety. Not life in general, really, just his own. No, to hell with it, the rest of life, the life outside his own, was pretty fucked up as well. With his hands on his knees, he laughed, he laughed without an echo in the reality he was in, an illusion of reality thrice folded upon itself in ways Thor could not even begin to conceive.  
When did Loki become so skilled in inter-dimensional arts? What bargains had he made? Or had it been just the energy he derived from being feared, respected yes, but feared, that drove him to expand his powers beyond anything Thor had known to exist in the realm of magic?  
Absurd, all of it. Absurd that he was a mortal now, he who once wielded thunder, absurd that he loved his brother, this wretched creature of smoke and mirrors, absurd that his brother kissed him like he'd meant it, absurd that –  
“Stop, Thor. For once in your life, **_stop_**.” Loki commanded.  
And Thor’s mind stopped, as he looked up at him. He was wearing the black suit again and his face was contorted in an expression akin to pain. Thor straightened his back, facing him. His arms flew to his sides loosely, in an expression of question and surrender.  
“Why am I here, Loki? For fuck’s- _for fuck’s sake_ Loki, I am weary. Speak truthfully. For once. I am tired of your nonsense, I am tired of hearing of Asgard, I am tired, tired, _tired_ of all things, I am –“  
  
“I have left another self in my stead, on the throne.” Loki cut over Thor, raising his voice to cover him, then letting it drop again “After I brought Asgard into order, after I traveled in diplomatic missions throughout the realms. After I changed my face and name so many names I almost forgot my own, by spying in every realm to gain information that I would prove to be useful in keeping Asgard safe. I placed an illusion of myself on the throne, under Heimdall’s watch. I am there. I am here. I am in a dozen other places Thor, but the real me, the puppet master, is here, with you. It has been since Colombia." Loki cocked his head, just a little "I am the greatest actor in the Nine Realms and beyond, don’t feel bad for being fooled.” Loki grinned, but this grin was practiced, and it was delivered without any intent, it simply looked tired from overuse “You took everything from me, Thor. And I wanted to see you lose everything too. Best seats in the house," he pointed in Thor's general direction " _right by your side_.”  
Thor inhaled, rising his chin defiantly in his direction, but said nothing. What could Loki say worse than Thor had already told himself? Oh, his brother could flay you with his words but Thor knew he deserved every single one of them. And if Loki found out somehow, somehow figured it out Thor loved him, and did what he did just to make it all worse, Thor would try to kill him.  
He knew it was futile though.  
He knew he loved him still.  
  
Loki put his hands one into each other, as if cradling a fragile thing, the same too familiar gesture their mother did.  
“And there I was, cutting coke in Colombia, trying to get as high as I could because in the body of a God it does not really matter, when suddenly you drop on me like a building. Sweating, smelling like the sex you just had with this dark-haired woman. You flip the table, you kick me off the sofa. I believe the words you used were _not this kind of shit_ , you said. You said: _you are like a brother to me. If you were my brother, I would love you too much to let you do this_.” Loki tilted his head towards Thor and narrowed his eyes just a bit, in almost perfect semblance of a cat “And there it was: **_sentiment_**.” He said, his mouth curling into an expression of disgust. He looked away from Thor and turned his attention to the nebulae. Oh, how Loki hated sentiment.   
How Loki hated to _possess_ sentiment.  
“It was too easy to fall into the motions with you, because we were almost like before -like when we were children. It was too easy to stick around and make sure you stay alive. I watched you crumble and the satisfaction I derived from it was less than I expected. I…” his mouth scrunched, another expression of disgust, his shoulders tensing just a bit as if he was tasting something bad “I suffered when I saw you in pain. Real pain, the human kind. I suffered when I saw your state after I told you of mother. I suffered when I saw you under that tree, ready to take a bullet. That was why my illusion fell apart earlier today.”  
  
Had it been today? Had it all happened within the span of 24 hours? Thor felt like it had been days, weeks, crawling by past him.  
“I saw your death in that moment. As if Skuld had put her shield upon my face and in the reflection of her shield I saw you fall, bullet in your head, then a continuous barrage of them, all over your body, blood splattering all over the tree. I saw your death and I came undone.” Loki seemed to be making a grand effort in turning around to face him again, but he did, and Thor saw him make himself hold his chin high towards him, an act of defiance as much as any.   
Strangely, he looked afraid. Not of Thor, no. But of his own self.   
“There’s nowhere left to hide now, I suppose...” Loki got on one knee and his finger drew a rune in the sand. Tiwaz. Loki was invoking Tyr’s help, and if Tyr was invoked, he would not let Loki lie. The rune burst in flames and Loki lifted it from the sand. It was burning a flame on the top of his palm and Loki whispered something, something he spoke even beneath the low sound of the breeze, and the rune diminished in size until it was small enough for him to put it on his tongue. It burned embers on it and Thor could still see it between his lips as he spoke.  
“If I were to tell you this without the rune, you would not believe me. Don't give me that look, brother... you think that what I did, I did for some hidden reason, to toy with you, to sink so low into depravity just to exact another branch of revenge, of suffering. Perhaps you assume I would have made you care for this man, and then killed him horribly, or something of the like. But no, brother," the word felt like dirt coming from between Loki's lips, like rust "the depravity is of a different kind and what I did, I did because I wanted to make you suffer, at first. But I could not follow through. And what I did that night, I did out of my own will, because I-“ Loki choked.  
He hunched over himself, hand to his stomach and he opened his mouth. Burning embers dripped out of it.  
He’d been trying to lie.   
Tyr’s word poured out of him, whether he liked it or not and until he would be done, Tyr would not let him speak anything but the truth. So much like Loki, to take it upon himself to be better, then stumble midway, trying to retreat. The embers burned in drops that looked like lava and they fell into the sand, forming dark granules. Loki’s eyes were red rimmed, glossy. He was in pain and he was only then realizing he was not going to take this one back. That he had to follow through, or Tyr would make him suffer for all eternity if that’s how long it took to get the truth out of him.  
  
It was one thing to see Loki bloody by his own hand and another to watch him suffer at the hand of another. Thor’s hands twitched, his chest ached, and he closed the distance between them with a short stride, his hands grabbing on to Loki’s arms. His brother looked up at him with red rimmed eyes in surprise, as if he would have expected for someone else to have been there instead of Thor.  
Loki opened his mouth to speak again but the burning embers over spilled over his teeth and lips, thick and golden, almost like honey.   
He was frowning in pain, his eyes welling up with tears as he also took a hold of Thor’s arms, steadying himself in them as his throat constricted into forming words and another wave of embers dripped from between his lips. It was with that last molten drip that Loki’s voice reached through.  
“Because I’ve always loved you, like a brother should not love a brother. I've loved you with lust. I loved you with desire.” It spilled out and Loki’s mouth burned with fire, the rune on his tongue extinguishing itself, leaving just a black, ashy mark in the middle, slowly fading away. It left Loki’s mouth in a dark smoke that disappeared into the night sky.  
Loki was looking down at the sand and the ash where the embers he had vomited out had been. One hand on his knee, the other still holding on to one of Thor’s arms. Thor felt him first, he felt him shake, shiver uncontrollably, before he saw the dark drops that had started to stain the sand. His tears were so heavy they fell onto the sand in full droplets that dissipated beneath his feet.   
His voice was not shaking, but it was spent.  
“Now you know."  
  
  



	5. Chapter 5

  
  
Loki closed his eyes, a movement filled with intent, and willed them to be heavy.  
His hands rested on the arms of the throne and he relaxed his entire body, feeling as if his hands would melt into the gold. He could hear it clearly, the sound of memory, behind his closed eyelids. He could hear steps running across the marble floor of the throne room at night, silhouettes hiding behind the great pillars, their faces shining only momentarily in the flames of the torches mounted on the walls. It was him and Thor, only it was not really him.  
It was a girl, dark of hair, fair of skin and red of lips. A girl who had cultivated a friendship with Thor, a girl he had met on the edge of the forest and which he took a liking to. A girl who was never around Thor when Loki was, because they were the same person. It was that girl who took Thor's first kiss, not Sif, who had been trying to.  
But Thor, Thor was taken by the dark beauty by the forest, though he knew little of her and they spoke mostly of other things than themselves. Every time Thor went out without telling anyone, Loki did too, just that instead he turned himself into a girl by the name of Hjordis and she met Thor at the edge of the forest, her green cape fluttering in the wind. She showed him hidden paths and touched his shoulder as they watched the deer sleep in the moss.  
Late one night, Thor took Hjordis into the palace and they walked among the shadows of the throne room, their steps echoing so faintly on the floors and Thor pulled her behind a pillar, and there he held her tight and said he does not want them to be apart, and he kissed her then, a touch so chaste and soft she was almost mad at him for his lack of daring.  
  
Hjordis disappeared one day. She sent him a letter, in which she spoke of travel, of family bonds and loyalty. Loki had burned the green cape to ashes and watched them disperse in the garden. He destroyed Hjordis in spite of his plans to entertain the affair for a long time, take his fill of Thor and perhaps disappear completely as Loki somehow, and become Hjordis instead. But as morning came and Hjordis sat on a fur in the great hall, with Thor asleep in her lap, she realized with terror just how much she could not do what she planned, and with a great sadness, also realized that, if Thor could not love Hjordis in her true form, as Loki, then it did not matter at all.  
For Loki would not be contained in a box simply because the box was pretty.  
Thor had been heartbroken, as young boys are, but it passed as other girls came, as fights came, as mead came, as the sorrows of boys usually come to pass. But Sif knew Thor's first kiss, first love, had been taken, though she did not know by whom, for Thor had kept silent about Hjordis all his life, the one secret he kept all to himself, and Loki felt in that a bittersweet victory of sorts. More bitter than sweet but a victory nonetheless.   
  
And so he lived, with the memory of a kiss he'd stolen over lips that were and were not his own. Through many ages he passed, watching Thor touch many bodies, none of them his own, for he never had the courage to attempt his trick again. He watched them come and go and dissolve into memory as Thor moved on, and only once was Loki worried, for Thor had met a woman in Vanaheim. Her name Loki had forgotten, but he remembered when he went to visit, he remembered she was dark of hair, white of skin and green of eyes and Loki had stumbled outside the halls of the town's main hall and inhaled the brisk evening air, to steady himself.  
So lost in her eyes his brother looked, and she was of face and stature, merely an older Hjordis. Her memory had not faded in his mind and Loki was terrified of how mad he'd go with envy and regret, if Thor took that woman as his consort. But she too, faded away to memory, as she was glacier, rock, and Thor was burning embers and fire - she could not cool him down, and he could not warm her up.  
They parted ways soon after Thor's diplomatic visit to Vanaheim had ended.  
  
To hate Thor, Loki tried. And for the most part, he succeeded, but only to balance the scales in the confronts of how much he loved him, how much he desired him. It was the most potent of aphrodisiacs, that mixture of hate, love, fear and shame, and it fueled Loki's obsession with his brother, feeding the flame almost effortlessly.  
He became so reckless in his confusion, in his anger at himself, for not being a better person and not sighing after the memory of Thor's lips. He took a knife to Thor more than once and Thor bled at his hand and Loki was none happier for it. Loki wanted to kill him, just to make it all stop, to know he'd be gone and he would not have to to look at his face anymore, look up at him when Thor was not looking, stand in his close proximity because maybe, just maybe, Thor might touch him, squeeze his shoulder or pat his back in banter.  
Starved he was, and Thor was the sustenance he only got crumbs from, so he was always weak and ravenous.  
  
Loki did not remember when it started.  
He just knew without a doubt that he had always loved Thor.  
  
All those things, all those memories, him sitting on the throne, conveying the memory of a kiss, all those memories within memories, all unfolded within Loki's mind like a Lotus flower, petal after petal, as he stood there in the desert of his creation, tattered with auroras and nebulae, the tears in his eyes that he was unwilling to cry forcing themselves out of him. He did not remember the last time he'd had so little control over himself but such was the gift, such was the punishment of Tyr. The truth he had said was not just truth in word, but it was also truth in emotion, and Loki was compelled to let out his sorrow just as much as he had spilled out the truth.  
He was clenching Thor's jacket still, as he felt weak and dizzy and the desert reality he had created almost stumbled around them, but he clenched his fingers until he felt Thor's flesh under the fabric, he he dug deep into his arm, until he could focus enough to maintain the illusion steady.   
  
Loki looked up and he saw Thor's face, his face unlike his face, hair short, darker, tired eyes and deep lines across his face, a Thor that was not radiant as the sun anymore, but shone through the darkness in a shy shimmer, much like a distant galaxy; a galaxy quiet and peaceful in its own destruction, tattered with supernovae that exploded silent in the void of the Cosmos. Unbearably beautiful he was, even in his mortal form, unbearably much Loki loved him, in his fragile state of flesh and bone.  
That was why Loki pushed his arm away and covered his face as he cursed Tyr to the Norns and back in his mind, for demanding more than words from him, for demanding _sentiment._  
He sat down in the sand, hands still on his face, his hair in disarray, and he folded on himself and wailed, the dunes echoing with his sorrow, and he wept with short breaths, unable to find his calm in the midst of the flood.   
The fact he hated himself was nothing new, he always had, but now Thor would find him repugnant in his entirety and perhaps Loki deserved it, for all that he had done. So he stood there in a place that was not a place, hands over his eyes so as not to see his brother's face, so as not to be forced to look into his eyes for fear of what he might see in them.  
But it had to be done, for even rock wears away under the steady crashes of the waves, millennia after millennia.  
  
Loki felt Thor move, he heard his feet shuffle over the sand, his heavy boots making sounds too real for such a surreal landscape. Thor sat down next to him and Loki felt his legs around him and he jerked away but Thor's arms took a hold of him and they were gentle and felt larger than life. And slowly, as if he was cradling a wild, wounded animal, Thor put his head on Loki's shoulder and he said nothing at all.  
If ever there could have been a greater pain than Thor showing him pity in the wake of what he'd just found out, Loki did not want to know, for his suffering felt eternal. There he was still, greater than good, holding his brother, the ugly creature who had spilled its venom over their entire lives and ruined it all with his confession, just because Thor had beckoned him one night two weeks before, and he had been too weak to say no and thought he would get away with it, because he always did.  
"I don't need your pity.." Loki muttered, in between gasps for air. He squeezed his eyes tightly, once, twice and felt his chest start to breathe more normally, but though the tears would subside, he had a feeling that the ache in his chest would be a tattoo etched inside of him forever. Thor did not let go of him, not even when Loki finally dropped his hands from his face and let them fall to his sides, they too now enclosed in the safe space offered by Thor's arms. He didn't look at him and Thor did not demand it.  
The auroras in the night sky were disappearing and in their stead, large, violently colored nebulae were appearing, in rhythm with Loki's emotions. They were eating up the stars, and supernovae were exploding all across them.  
The cosmic carnage was quiet but terrifyingly beautiful.  
  
Thor's voice whispered too close for comfort, even if he only had his forehead on Loki's shoulder, and was looking away from him, at the death of the skies above them:  
"How deep this sorrow burrows..." he squeezed Loki in his arms, just a little "all the worst for it when we could have had the time we lost."  
Loki let out a sigh, and put his fingers across his forehead, across his eyes, his arm over Thor's, which was across Loki's chest. He shook his head in tired confusion.  
"You're not making any sense, Thor... I-please... please let-let this be done with. Your pity disgusts me, and I don't need your comfort. Or your forgiveness."  
Thor let his hands drop from around Loki and Loki braced himself with his shadows, but Thor instead took a hold of his face and made him turn his head, and it was torture, to feel his hands so gentle. What Thor saw when he turned Loki's face towards his own was a mask of grief, a grief so pure it might as well have been holy. His eyes looked as if they had cried for aeons, and his lips were swollen and wet.  
  
He kissed him.  
  
Loki tried to push him away and when it didn't work, he called upon his shadows, a black mass that erupted from his chest, trying to pry Thor away with ink-dark tentacles. But Thor held on to him.  
"But I forgive you" he said, he spoke into his lips, undeterred by Loki's magic, hurting him as it was "I forgive you, I forgive you". Loki would hurt him, he would, he would. "I forgive you if you forgive yourself, if you forgive me as well, because I loved you so, and I have never been brave enough to say it."  
And so, the chaos remained floating in time and space.  
Loki's magic dissipated from around Thor, the violent skies ceased their destruction, fragments of exploding planets frozen as they were, their pieces scattered above the desert in blue and violet fires.  
Thor opened his eyes, the lines of his face still contorted with pain from Loki's magic, but Loki saw the truth in those eyes, clear as day, as his brother's eyes were always poor liars. He saw his love, and he saw it tinged with pain and regret.  
"I have failed you this time too," he said "I left you a kingdom in ruin at first, but my greatest trespass perhaps was this. I should have been braver, I should have-"  
"I have kept it hidden, Thor..." Loki muttered, bewildered still, boring deep into Thor's eyes for a lie, but unable to find any "We are both... at fault... I-" Loki frowned in confused anguish, so close to Thor's face their noses touched. So close their lips he could feel his breath on his own. The realization washed over him like a tidal wave:  
"You _love me_."  
"I do, you fool."  
  
The world collapsed.  
All of it in its entirety, the sky fell, the supernovae exploded, the stars spread all around them, small and distant, close and gargantuan, the essence of the Cosmos twisted around itself and every reality fell around them, like thin veils of silk, washing them in waves of dimensions.  
Loki jumped out of Thor's arms in a moment, his movement fast, and his arms went around the other man, covering Thor from behind. One hand went over Thor's eyes while he buried his face in his hair, whispering things Thor did not understand, whispering them fast, faster, as fast as he could, his body sheltering Thor from the collapse of the worlds.  
  
Then they were in the faraway edge of the military base, under the shelter of the night. The breeze was cold, and they saw a stretch of darkness beyond the electrified fence. Loki let go of Thor immediately and stood next to him on one knee as Thor gasped for air. As soon as he got a breath in, he gagged and vomited. He spat out bile onto the dirt, and it shimmered with black crystals - the produce of hundreds, millions of dimensions upon which Loki built his illusions, his worlds. His face was as white as a sheet and he barely found his breath. Loki's hand was rubbing his back and squeezing his shoulder.  
"I am sorry, Thor, I lost control. I'm sorry."  
Thor's words had been enough to make him lose his balance on the worlds and only Loki knew how fragile the construct of multiple layers of dimensions was - how easy he had to tip toe around them. He could not work his magic to make Thor feel better. His magic was not for healing.  
When he felt like he had nothing else left inside him to vomit out, Thor's hand reached for Loki and when he found him, he leaned into him and pressed his head into his chest. Loki put his hand on the back of his neck and pressed his cheek into his hair.  
  


* * *

  
  
  
Thor did not remember losing consciousness, but he did remember the sickness rising in his throat and when he opened his eyes, he felt it in the back of his throat still. He gagged a little, but when nothing came back up, he took a deep breath. His body felt weak, weaker than he ever remembered it feeling before, no matter how long he stayed awake, no matter how long he’d walked or what type of sustained effort he kept up. His body felt like it had been through days of fighting. Muscles sore, tongue feeling like sandpaper in his mouth.  
It all came back to him slowly, like memories from a repressed trauma – the multi-dimensional illusion, Loki’s words. How Loki felt on his lips. How worlds collapsing felt over his own body and how Loki sheltered him with his own.  
 _Love._  
Love, love, love blooming in his chest, weighed down by immeasurable regret for all the things that could have been and which were not.  
  
There was someone on the edge of the bed next to him. Thor turned his eyes away from the ceiling and saw Kuznetso- no, he saw Loki with Kuznetsov’s face, battered and bruised, sitting there with a cigarette between his fingers, elbows on his knees. He was not playing his part for the time being and everything in the way he slouched to the way he was holding the cigarette spoke of Loki. He was staring into nothing, his eyes glowing golden.  
He had not noticed Thor’s state of wakefulness because he was in council with Heimdall.   
The cigarette had been burning itself between his fingers to the point where it was threatening to burn his fingers soon. Thor stretched out his arm towards it and the movement only made his muscles more sore, but he could take it. He put his hand on his knee and Loki flinched, turning his head towards him but his eyes were lost in a distant space, glistening golden; even so, he’d wanted Thor to know he felt his touch. He stared into nothing for a moment longer then turned his head away.  
Thor reached out and took the cigarette from between his fingers and held it between his own, scattering the ash over the floor, and then bringing it to his lips, inhaling the last embers out of it.  
  
He looked around and realized he was in the military base’s hospital area. It was thankfully empty, and the equipment was minimal, in between rows of empty beds with blue-green sheets. There was only one neon lit up near his bed and it brought light to the beds to his left and right, leaving the rest in eerie darkness. Unwillingly, his eyes searched for the body bags where Lynch and Miller were put into, but there were none to be seen anywhere.  
Loki finally turned to him, watching him with Kuznetsov’s eyes and Thor felt a pang of guilt looking at his swollen eye, cheek and upper lip. Why did he do it? Why did he hit him? He didn’t know. Loki could have pushed him back faster than he had, but he probably took the two punches (or was it three? _Four_?) Thor delivered because, just like Thor, he felt guilt and shame. He took the cigarette from between Thor’s fingers and stubbed it somewhere on the floor where he had an ashtray.  
“You’re not supposed to smoke in here.” Loki said. Thor offered him a weak smile “They put your collapse down to dehydration and IV’d you for a while but I took it off earlier because you didn’t need it, it would have only made you sick. I didn’t have a choice because Sajak was looking for you and he found us with you being sick and called the medics. But you’ll be fine now.”  
Thor nodded, swallowing, trying to wet his throat a little.  
“I’m sorry. I couldn’t-I couldn’t hold it together. It was too much. Holding down so many dimensions on the tips of your fingers is no easy task, and the slightest trepidation in focus can make them collapse, which was what happened. The toil on your human body would have been immense if they would have collapsed over you, with your eyes open. I did what I could. This one time, I truly did not mean to hurt you."  
Thor licked his lips, they felt like parchment but whatever words he was trying to make his tongue form were stopped by Loki, who laid a hand on his chest:  
“Don’t try to talk, you might say something stupid. Besides, your vocal chords were affected. They will be fine by morning. And Thor,” Thor’s eyes rose to attention to lock onto Loki’s, who had momentarily assumed his true form, and was wearing the same black suit as before while he leaned into Thor’s chest “if you lied to me, _I will_ kill you.” He put his hand over Thor’s forehead before he could react “Now, sleep.” He commanded, and Thor felt himself be dragged towards the depths of darkness.   
What he did not get to see was how Loki dropped his hand from his forehead to his cheek and the way his face softened as he watched Thor sleep.  
How full of love it was.  
  


* * *

  
  
  
He did not manage to speak to him when he woke up: Loki was not there and when he went into the waiting room, he was flanked by the rest of the guys. They were playing cards, in moderate silence. Pavel was slouched over three chairs, his shemagh over his face, deep in sleep. Loki, maddeningly so, was thoroughly Kuznetsov, to the point where not even a shimmer in his eyes gave away anything that might be hidden beneath. Thor hated it, because he had so many questions, but there was nothing he could do. He could wait. He had waited for hundreds of years already.  
  
Neither of them went into the morgue, instead they took the Jeeps and headed back to Tawfiq’s. Loki arrived to the car too late and his usual spot had been taken by a Blackpool representative who drove with them to Tawfiq, to take their statements about what had happened, make up a report and proceed with the delivery of the bodies. Thor was driving, body still sore, muscles writhing in pain with every move.  
They passed by the National Museum of Afghanistan and turned left towards the Shur Bazar district where Tawfiq’s house was and it was on Darulaman Road that Thor was suddenly brought back to reality, as they drove past a Police cordoned area.  
A car was by the side of the road, windows shattered with bullet holes, doors open. There was blood on the torn apart glass, on the front seats and the road. It must have happened the night before, because there was silence all around it, no reporters, no people peering curiously from behind the policemen. A tow car was driving in its direction, guided by two police cars who were blocking that side of the road.  
Thor suddenly remembered where he was and what was going on around him and his entire body responded to that, alert and awake at its surroundings.  
The world had not stopped just because Loki had kissed him back. Earth did not give two shits about Thor Odinsson, and war even less so. Thor Odinsson was mortal now, and he would get what mortals got.  
How long did Thor even had left with Loki? A human life was just a blink of an eye in the eyes of an Asgardian God. The concept of his own mortality had never been clearer than it was in that moment, spreading itself before Thor’s mind, a venomous realization that was infecting every fiber of his being.  
“-without it being too problematic. Don't you think?” The Blackpool man ended the sentence. Thor had not even heard him speak at all “Odinson? Were you paying attention?”   
“Kind of. Run it by me again.”  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  
Tawfiq was silent.  
He’d come and went across the living room as the Blackpool representative was interviewing them all, separately at first, then all together. He had brought them some tea, exchanged a nervous glance with Thor and then disappeared in the kitchen. The man had closed his folder late in the afternoon, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand, unaccustomed to the heat. He probably spent all his time at Kabul HQ, in a nice little cubicle with air conditioning and drank American beer in the evening, the kind that costs a lot to import.  
“I believe I got everything we need, thank you, gentlemen.” He got up and put the folder in his suitcase “If you want to, you can contact someone else to join you, or we can assign someone to your crew, or you can continue as you are, if you feel so inclined. Mr. Miller and Mr. Lynch will be taken care of and transported back to their families within the day.”  
He stretched his hand out to Thor and Thor shook it, squeezing it a bit too hard. The man subsequently disappeared outside, where a black car was waiting for him. And, just like that, the loss of life had been quantified, measured, penned down and moved into statistics, and nothing at all in the world had changed in lieu of it.  
  
Tawfiq stepped inside, rubbing his fingers across his beard:  
“Can I bring something to you?” he offered “Beer?” he turned to Loki, who sported the bruises of Kuznetsov “Ice?”  
Loki gave him just half a smile, just like Kuznetsov would have done.  
“Beer, Tawfiq, please.” Pavel asked, and Tawfiq was gone in a second. They heard him rummage through the kitchen, bottles clanking together, a bottle opener ringing through the cutlery in a drawer. The hiss of the beer as he popped the caps. He brought them on a tray, which he put on the small table between the two sofas, and then left in silence.  
They all reached down towards the beers and drank a few gulps in silence. Sajak was sitting on the left couch, next to Pavel, while Bog occupied the other sofa on his own. Loki was leaning into the bookshelf behind it, arms crossed.   
Him and Thor were the only ones who did not reach for the beers. Thor was leaning into the large wooden table that overlooked the room. Since no one was saying anything, stuffing their throats with alcohol so they wouldn’t have to talk, he decided to address the elephant in the room:  
“So, who is going to do it?”  
No one asked what ‘it’ was. Thor had found out what ‘it’ was in Sierra Leone when his translator, a boy fresh out of college, got hacked down with a machete and Thor had to deliver the news to his mother. Bog ran a hand through his beard, then through his hair. Sajak stared into nothing and Pavel drank from his bottle almost without breathing.  
“We can split the task.”  
“Blackpool will do it.” Sajak said but even Bog gave him the side eye.  
Pavel put his bottle between his legs as he dropped back on the sofa:  
“I don’t like to do this. “ his Romanian accent was even thicker, as his voice grew more weary “We can do it later.”  
“If we don’t do it now, we never will. Blackpool already called them last night.” Thor said.  
“I’ll do it.” They all directed their eyes in Loki’s (Kuznetsov’s) direction. He looked them all in the eye, one by one “I’ll just need the numbers. I think they had left their contacts with you, Pavel.” He continued and offered a grin “I remember them saying you’re the only one with enough of an ounce of decency to not try and steal Miller’s wife.”  
A tired general laughter filled the room for a moment, and Pavel went through his phone and handed it to Loki. He took it and left the room, going outside.  
  
Of course, Thor thought, of course that the best choice for someone to call Miller’s wife and Lynch’s mother would have been the God of Lies, Wielder of Illusion, Bringer of Chaos. The Silvertongue.  
Thor felt a swell in his chest as he watched Loki, masked as Kuznetsov, step across the kitchen and then outside in the inner yard.   
They could not hear what was being spoken but they all looked through the window at various intervals and, at the end of the last conversation, the one with Lynch’s mother, Thor saw him smile. It was the kind of smile that comes from someone else’s words and Thor knew that whatever Loki had told them, whatever words he chose, whatever web of lies he’d created to make the dead seem like men greater than they had actually been, had been a mercy to those women.  
Lynch’s mother was second generation Russian, and Miller’s wife had always said Kuznetsov seemed the nicest out of them all from the photos and videos she’d seen. Loki knew what he was doing when he’d volunteered to call them.  
  
The rest of them stood in silence in the living room even long after Loki had gone up to his room, until the shadows of the evening fell upon them and they covered whatever it was they were feeling in that moment with cigarettes, cards, and Al Jazeera in the background, playing under their chatter on the TV. Then they slowly scattered away. Sajak and Bog went out to drink some more, while Pavel joined Tawfiq at the table outside and they began to play checkers.  
Thor walked up the stairs, finally finding it in himself to take off his jacket. It was not even his own, it was Pavel’s, because Thor’s was too bloodstained to ever be wearable again. With it in his hand, he walked towards his room and opened the door.  
  
He was in the Asgardian throne hall.  
The door to his room was gone, behind him there was nothing but the high gold columns. It was dark outside, and the torches burned through the hall. Ahead of him, the throne, with Loki sitting on it.  
He was not wearing his horned helmet. He was not wearing a cape or even the dark emerald colors he usually preferred. Instead, his hair was loose over his shoulders, falling down in waves, and his clothes were completely black. A similar attire to the tunic and leather pants he liked, but so much more subdued. There were rings of amber on his fingers, and a bracelet fell across his left wrist. But otherwise, his brother was darkness, and the throne seemed subdued under the weight of his power.  
Odin had always seemed to burn his throne, a glowing orb of glory. Thor would have looked just the same on it. But Loki… Loki held the throne in subjugation.  
The throne had never been kind to him and his legacy, so Loki would not show it any mercy in return.  
  
To see him like that, Thor felt a surge of adoration.  
  
“Why are we here?” he asked.  
Loki did not reply, instead he pointed behind him. A girl was sneaking between the pillars, her cape shining green like emeralds. Behind her, a young boy, still far removed from manhood, fair of skin and gold of hair, with eyes that shimmered with excitement. He took her hand and she looked at him over her shoulder, all black hair and jade eyes she was, and she smiled.  
They disappeared beyond the shadows.  
Thor frowned at the memory that stepped too close to him for comfort and then the realization came to him clear as day.  
 _Of course._  
How had he not seen it?  
He looked away from the dark spot where the two had disappeared and turned his eyes towards Loki, over his shoulder:  
“When I kissed Hjordis, I imagined it was you. Because of the shadows, she had your features.”  
“Liar.”  
“I swear it by Tyr.” Thor immediately added, turning towards Loki completely. His reaction made Loki jump from the throne, a look on his face similar to a predator’s. He went down the stairs that lead to the throne with barely guessed movements, as if there were shadows simmering on the edges of his body, as if power was barely contained. He looked graceful and dangerous.  
Thor saw his lips move and suddenly, the Tiwaz rune appeared in his hand and Loki made it small in his palm as he crossed the distance between the two of them and stood face to face to Thor.  
“By Tyr, then.” He said, his eyes not leaving Thor’s for a second as he stretched out his hand with Tiwaz burning on the top of his palm, daring Thor to take it.  
  
Thor didn’t.  
Instead, he took the one step that still separated them and opened his mouth.  
He registered surprise for only a moment on Loki’s face before he took control over it. He brought the rune to the tips of his fingers and put them in Thor’s mouth, the rune pressing itself inside, burning embers on his tongue.   
Loki’s fingers rested over Thor’s lower lip for a moment, the tips touching his tongue, and he seemed distressed by the intrusion, but he did not falter. When he pulled them away, slowly, brushing past Thor’s lower lip and over his chin, only then did Thor close his mouth.  
“I have always loved you, you fool. I don’t need Tiwaz, or Tyr to say it to you. Not now.” Thor spoke, and there were no honey-like ember liquids dripping from between his teeth, because Tyr was compelling him to say the truth and Thor was not going to fight it “Ask me all you want to know. I won’t falter. Ask me about being King - I care not for being King, I don’t deserve it. I never wanted it, not truly. But I was born into it and thought it as my duty. Ask me about Hjordis, how I saw you in her and that was why I kissed her. Ask me about the-“  
Loki did not let him finish and he cut through his words with an unexpected question:  
“What were you thinking when you got up from the grass and aimed your gun the other day?”  
Tiwaz burned across his tongue, sensing he wanted to lie, but the burn was warning enough. Fine. Loki will know everything, for Thor had never lied to him, regardless of what Loki liked to think of him. What he liked to think of the world, as he always assumed one always had underlying reasons to say certain things. But he would give Loki even his pain, if he demanded it. He was not a God anymore, he had very little else left to give.   
“I was thinking I would have liked to die by Yggdrasil instead of a common tree. I was thinking that it was what I deserved though. I was thinking about dying and that I hoped it was going to be painful.”  
“Why did you want it to hurt?”  
“Because I deserve a painful death. Perhaps an ounce of this mortal soul's pain would atone just a bit, the mess I’ve done.”  
“Do you love me?”  
“Immensely.”  
  
Tiwaz burned on his tongue and turned to ash, smoking its way out of his mouth and into the darkness, as it had done the night before from Loki’s mouth. Now it was just them, face to face into the silence of the night, sheltered again by realities and illusions of realities, away from the view of the Cosmos itself.  
And Thor had had enough.  
He put his hand behind Loki’s head and he kissed him with despair and lust and agony and love. And Loki, oh how Loki took a hold of his t-shirt and fisted the fabric as if he was about to rip it apart. They gasped in between kisses and their kisses were ugly and sloppy and wet with desire and Thor felt the fire in his heart burn like he did not remember it burning since a very long time ago, when he used to raise Mjolnir to the skies and call for lightning. He had lost his totem of power, lost his lightning.  
  
Loki was weapon now.  
Loki was lightning.  
  
It was not a time for decorum, Thor did not have time anymore. Within a blink of a cosmic eye, his life would be gone, and he did not have enough years on hand in his mortal body to have his fill of Loki. He pulled at his tunic and pulled it off him with awkward moves, Loki’s arms thrashing about, desperate to return to Thor’s body.  
His brother walked backwards, pulling Thor along with him, hands pulling at his clothes. He pulled him down to the cold floor and they were immediately surrounded by soft furs and deep red blankets woven with golden thread.   
Thor watched him in the torch light for a moment when they broke apart, his body slender, skin marble white. His to have, at long last.   
Loki’s alabaster hands tugged at his mesh-tec t-shirt and pulled it off him, then, while still kissing him, he pried open the zipper of his pants while Thor was kicking off his unlaced boots. He got undressed before he even realized what he was doing. The night was warm and Thor felt weary for a moment, worried that someone might come in and catch them. But the throne room was just an illusion - they were not here nor there. They were safe and protected.   
He watched Loki standing back for a long moment, his eyes traveling across Thor’s naked body, resting over his erection for a second, his face ravenous for it, before traveling further across him, with both desire and curiosity swimming in his eyes.  
  
Thor's body was not what it used to be but it was all he had to give and he was ready to let Loki take it and do with it as he pleased. It felt different, to be watched like this by Loki, to have every inch of himself taken in by his green eyes. As much as Thor had wanted it, dreamt about it, just as much he felt mesmerized in that moment. It used to be different, in his day dreams. In his fantasies, he had imagined he would be the one who wielded great power and Loki would sit on his lap on the throne, naked and vulnerable in his arms. But here they were now, Loki in his dark, kingly robes and Thor mortal and naked, under the God-King's gaze.  
Loki leaned in closer, his hand touching Thor’s hip, traveling upwards across his stomach, his chest, his neck, going through his hair as he leaned in closer and suddenly he felt Loki’s naked skin over his own.  
Of course he did.   
He didn’t know why Loki made a show out of undressing him in the first place, when he could command the laws of the illusion in any way he wanted.  
He felt Loki’s own throbbing cock next to his own, pressing into his stomach as they closed into a another kiss, another embrace of roaming hands and fingers. It was skin like any other skin, but the knowledge that it was Loki's made it feel different to Thor's hands. Delicate shades of blue blossomed beneath the white skin wherever he touched. It was mesmerizing.   
  
Thor’s hand went up and down Loki’s spine and he held him steady, gently lowering him over the furs. He stepped between his legs, spreading them open with his hands, and they slipped from the inside of his thighs to the back of them, just to feel more of him. Thor's fingers traveled over the skin, watching it turn a darker shade of blue where he pressed, before he leaned in over him, covering him with his body.   
They were eye to eye, and he could not help himself from just looking at his face, taking him in closer than he had ever been. He ran his fingers over his forehead, brushing the hair away from his face, his thumb tracing a path over his cheek and Loki shuddered under that touch, as meek as a lamb and Thor loved him all the more for it.  
"You can take this skin off, if you want to." Thor said.  
"No, this skin is yours. This is the one you've always known me in."  
"And the other?"  
"The other belongs to myself." Loki said, selfishly, with a trace of arrogance he didn't even mean in that moment.   
  
Thor smiled and he kissed his face, he kissed his neck and trailed kisses all over his chest, Licking and biting where he felt like it and it seemed like hours ago when he started to kiss him, because he wanted to take in every inch of him. He licked circles around his nipples, pale and pink over his white skin, until they were prickly with goosebumps and hard, and he buried his face in the bones of his hips, kissing the dark trail under his navel, burying his nose in the dark tuft of hair between his legs as his mouth finally gave attention to his cock, pressing a kiss at the base. Loki hissed under his breath for the first time when he felt that.  
He kept placing kisses around it, cupping his balls with his hand as he did so, pressing gently, breathing in his smell as he did so.The most intimate of scents, and it was Thor's now. He licked him from the base up, his mouth meeting a pool of precome already gathered on the tip and dripping down onto his stomach in pearly drops over his dark pubic hair, the contrast eerily erotic in Thor’s eyes.  
He took Loki in his mouth, feeling the warmth of him, the smoothness of his cock, the way he tasted, bitter on the back of his throat, and he licked him clean of it all.  
  
Loki’s hands went through his hair, over his shoulders, let him know when it was nice, good, or really good.  
He pushed him in his mouth slow, testing the waters, until he felt him deep at the base of his throat and Loki let out a sound that was completely involuntary, judging by the way it echoed through the throne hall, a moan and a hoarse yell at the same time. Thor felt him push his hips upwards, an instinctive reaction. He followed through again, once, twice, slowly easing Loki’s cock as deep into his mouth as he could take him, and every time he moaned louder, his own cock throbbed more.   
He would learn, soon and fast, what Loki liked best and he would work his way around it to bring him past the borders of pleasure until Loki would be too spent to do a thing but fall asleep in his arms every time. He'd learn his body like he'd always dreamt of doing.  
It was Loki though who pulled him out of his reverie by tugging at his hair, forcing his mouth to let go. It did with a line of spit and come dripping from his tongue and Loki took a second to look at him like that before he spoke.   
“Not like this. Inside me.” He said, asked, demanded, pleaded. Neither of them knew which one it was and it didn't even matter.   
  
Thor kissed Loki’s stomach once, twice, as he pulled himself back up, reached Loki’s mouth again and Loki hungrily tasted all of himself on Thor’s mouth and beard. Their lips were slick with come and their tongues slithered through it like snakes.  
“Do I need to-“  
“I have magic.” Loki cut through his question, his mouth reaching back up towards Thor’s, deprived of something it had greatly enjoyed, trying to get him to be silent again. Thor made note of it - no talking.   
Loki's hand went between them and touched Thor’s cock, squeezed it and stroked it a couple of times, hissing under his breath as if feeling it between his fingers was a pleasure in itself.   
How many times had Thor imagined those fingers touching him like that? He heard Loki's rings clink together as he did so, the metal adding to the friction, come slicking all over them as Loki ran his fingers on the tip of his cock and spread it all over it. Thor let out a jagged breath, licked his lips involuntarily and squeezed his eyes shut for a moment.  
With Thor’s own hand at its base, they both guided his cock in inside Loki. Thor pushed slowly, feeling all of Loki closing in around him and enjoying the sensation. He was so warm and tight and slicked to the brim with whatever his magic offered him.  
Between half opened eyes, he saw Loki’s stomach muscles clench as he went deeper, saw the arch of his neck as he moaned out loud when Thor was inside him completely. He saw his face twist in pain for a few moments, before his muscles released the tension and his face flushed red.   
When Thor started moving, slowly at first, then figuring out a rhythm, Loki’s face was flush with focus and pleasure. His lips shimmered in the fire light, they shimmered swollen and red and Thor kissed them in between half breaths.  
  
Loki buried his fingernails inside him, scratched his back and shoulders the more he surrendered to the pleasure that was building up inside him. Thor started to stroke him too and Loki was moving up and down with the movement, his hand on the back of Thor's neck, squeezing, scratching. He looked selfishly lost in his pleasure and Thor loved seeing Loki like that because it was hid doing, he was the one who made Loki flush like that, he was the one who made those sounds of lust escape from his throat.   
It was unbearable, to have him in such a way, the sum of all of Thor’s affections contained in one act that hardly seemed to convey everything he felt.  
“Harder…” Loki demanded beneath him and Thor complied, his forehead in the crook of Loki’s neck, his hips pushing inside him as hard as they could, making his whole body move with the violence of his thrusts and Loki seemed to relish in it all; he seemed to ease into the violence of the act, the fucked-up nature of it all and so did Thor, as he pushed harder with a strength that would have hurt a human body. But Loki was riding it, his ass pushing back into his cock, his legs clenching Thor's sides, every muscle tense.   
  
It was Loki who came first, over his stomach, over his hand, over Thor’s chest, and just a moment later, torn apart by the way Loki was moving beneath him and the way his whole body clenched, Thor did the same, his yell filling the throne hall with echoes of lust. He let it wash over him in waves, as Loki did the same beneath him, and he did not move or lift his head from the crook of Loki’s neck, until he heard both of them start to breathe normally.  
His elbows were by the sides of Loki’s head, so his hands started to slowly caress his hair in rhythm with their breathing. After a while of that, he began to pull out but Loki’s hand stopped him, pressing on the small of his back, fingers splayed out.  
“Stay inside. Just for a while longer,” he asked, softly.  
With a swift motion of his fingers, the mess he’d made over the both of them disappeared and Thor slowly eased himself down over Loki.  
  
He could feel both their hearts. His own, hammering down fast and Loki’s, already settled into a normal rhythm. Dark hair and fair hair. A warrior and a magician. A mortal and a God. Such was their division, at their most basic foundations.  
How would they ever catch up with what had been dividing them for hundreds of years, if Thor only had one mortal life to live? How would he ever run fast enough to gather all the time they had lost, how would he ever gather it all in his fragile, mortal arms, when time was so vast and he was so small?  
  
Loki’s hand went on the back of his neck and his lips spoke into Thor’s ear so close they touched it as they moved:  
“I can hear you think.”  
Thor smiled and finally slipped out of Loki, though it earned him an unsatisfied groan. He fell to the side, his head on his outstretched arm. Loki’s head occupied the forearm, his hair tickling the inside of his elbow. Behind Loki’s head though, Thor held his hair in his fist, relishing in the comfort of feeling its silky texture in his palm.  
Loki's face was flushed, his lips swollen from the kissing, from the graze of Thor's beard.  
Something glowed on his face. Perhaps it was love. Perhaps it was just the afterglow of an orgasm, Thor couldn't tell but what he could was the fact that Loki was even more beautiful in that moment.  
There was something delicate about him as he laid there, naked, cheeks flushed.   
They faced each other like that, both of them naked on the floor of the throne room, and neither of them thought of the looming golden shape of it for now they had each other to gaze upon.  
  
“There is not enough time for me to make up for all the centuries we lost.” Thor said, looking into Loki’s eyes. Neither of their glances faltered, and there was something in Loki’s eyes Thor had not seen before – something like a door Thor had never seen opened.  
“Fools, we both have been.” Loki said.  
There was a shared smile between the two of them, lazy, warm. A smile Thor did not remember them exchanging ever before and he was taken aback by it. By the realization that, though they had spent centuries next to each other, they still had so much to see of one another, so much to learn, so much to experience.  
Loki put his fingers over Thor’s face, from his forehead, across his eyes, making him close them.  
“Let me do the thinking. Sleep.”  
  
And Thor did.  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading.   
> If you enjoyed this story or have thoughts you would like to share, please leave a comment, it means a lot.


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